Gurdjieff’s Zirlikner: the True Physician

Philip Heinegg, MD

recurring pattern in Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson[1] is a scathing description of terrestrial activities, contrasted with examples of the same activity as it should be, as it used to occur on the Earth, or as it occurs on other planets of our universe. For example, Beelzebub was pardoned for having rendered “a great service to our uni-being all-embracing endlessness”[2] in helping to diminish the custom of animal sacrifice on the Earth, while the “famous Persian Dervish” Assadulla Ibrahim Ogly crusaded across Asia doing ostensibly the same thing, but his result was World War I. Scientists could be great beings, such as the Chinese twin brothers and Makary Kronbernkzion, or just “sorry scientists of new formation.” The wise King Konuzion was praised for his invention of a dualistic religion which saved his people from opium addiction, but the learned beings assembled in Babylon spread the same religious theory throughout Asia and thereby helped to destroy the last remnants of the labors of Ashiata Shiemash. Anton Mesmer, an honest and humble learned being, contrasted with James Brade and Jean-Martin Charcot, one a Hasnamuss and the other a mama’s darling who both helped to destroy Mesmer’s career and suppress his accurate theories of hypnotism.

The descriptions of physicians certainly fit this pattern. We are presented with the ideal of physicians whom Gurdjieff calls “Zirlikners:”

These Zirlikners are those responsible individuals who voluntarily devote the whole of their existence to helping any being of that region to fulfill his being-obligations, if this being for some reason or other, or simply thanks to a temporary irregular functioning of his planetary body, ceases to be able to fulfill his inner or outer being-duty by himself.[3]

We later learn that Zirlikners are those from among whom are chosen the leaders on other planets. The king of Mars (the Toof-Nef-Tef), who asked to see Beelzebub just before his final departure from our solar system, was such a one:

I knew this Toof-Nef-Tef or king in his youth when he was only a ‘Plef-Perf-Noof,’ and a Plef-Perf-Noof is almost the same as our Zirlikners or, on your planet Earth, ‘physicians.’

Apropos, I must also tell you that on almost all the planets of our Great Universe and likewise on the other planets of this solar system also, a being becomes the head of beings by merit, just from among these former Plef-Perf-Noofs, or physicians.[4]

Pooloodjistius, whom Beelzebub asked to be his children’s educator (Oskianotsner), had been the chief Zirlikner of the planet Karatas, a role that Beelzebub’s son, Hassein’s father, would later assume. After Beelzebub’s pardon, his son became the assistant to the Great Observer of the movements of all the concentrations of the Megalocosmos. But how do these Zirlikners compare to their terrestrial counterparts? Although Beelzebub gives us an overall evaluation in the saying of Mullah Nassr Eddin, “For our sins, God has sent us two kinds of physicians, one kind to help us die, and the other to prevent us living,”[5] he nevertheless admits that it was not always so:

It must without fail be noticed that in former times also on your planet such professionals as are now called there physicians were almost the same and did almost the same as our Zirlikners among us; but gradually with the flow of time, the responsible beings there who devoted themselves to such a profession, namely, to the fulfillment of such a high voluntary being-duty taken upon themselves, degenerated like everything on that strange planet and became also absolutely peculiar.[6]

Interestingly, in the 1931 Manuscript of the Tales, he refers to a degeneration in the quality of vibrations from all three-brained beings, “when Meditation disappeared from among your favorites and the quality of their radiations ceased to correspond to the vibrations required by Nature.”[7] The peculiarity of the earthly physicians is also in part due to their formation:

The young three-brained beings there ... who prepare themselves to take ... the profession of physician only learn by rote as many names as possible from among the many thousands of these said medicinal means now known there.”[8]

Having memorized various old wives’ remedies, the extent of help offered to the patient by physicians trained in this manner consists merely in:

a being-effort of a certain intensity just to remember the names of several of these medical means and to write them later on a scrap of paper called by them ‘prescription.’ ... The intensity, however, of their effort depends first of all on the ‘social status’ of the being needing their help, and secondly on the number of eyes fixed upon them by the beings surrounding the given sick being.[9]

In addition to their training being based on a mechanical adoption of questionable remedies, physicians display a lack of psychological-emotional development. When caring for a wealthy client (“houses that smell of English pounds,”[10] the strongest currency of the time), the terrestrial physician is intense and obsequious to the point of “bootlicking,” but for the poor (“houses that smell of devalued German marks,”[11] nearly worthless prior to the financial collapse of 1930), the physician is also intense, but only in their desire to finish the consultation and leave as quickly as possible, after which their arrogance and contempt for their fellow men becomes more manifest.

The ultimate injustice, pronounced toward the end of the Tales by the Bokharian Dervish Hadji-Asvatz-Troov, is that the vibrations produced by the remedies used by these physicians are the most harmful of all to which three-brained beings can be exposed.

Etymology

Zirlikners represent the ideal of the profession. Is there an indication about their essential nature to be found in the name? This particular neologism is especially difficult to fathom: an alternate transliteration is Zerlikner; the Russian transliteration is цирликнер (Tsirlikner with Ts instead of Z), and since Armenian has letters for Z, Dz, Ts (aspirated) and Ts (unaspirated), as well as for a simple R and a rolled R, the possibilities abound.

Among the many source words possible:
Armenian: ձիր (tsir) gift
ցեղ (tserr) race, tribe
Ճեր (dzer) old, old man
զէրծ (zerts) free from
ժիր (zhir) active
Լիցք (litsk) full, abundant
Լիքը (likh) charge
Լի (li) full
Նէր (ner) Armenian plural
Russian: лих (likh) evil
Persian: زیر (zir, zer) great
Intelligible permutations from these source words include:
Those with abundant gifts
Those with a great charge
Those free from evil

We know from Gurdjieff’s autobiographical Meetings With Remarkable Men that he was prepared from a young age for a role as a physician of a higher order:

My family had at first intended me for the priesthood, but Father Borsh had a quite particular conception of what a real priest should be. As he conceived it, the duties of a priest should be combined with those of a physician...

He was in favor of my having a medical education, though not in the ordinary sense but as he understood it, that is, with the aim of becoming a physician for the body and a confessor for the soul.[12]

There are a number of examples of Gurdjieff’s practicing medicine, as more fully discussed in Christian Wertenbaker’s contribution to this publication.[13] Gurdjieff reportedly cured Thomas de Hartmann of a near-fatal case of typhoid in the Caucasus. He treated his wife’s breast cancer, saturating her body with his vibrations to keep her alive despite the advanced metastases. Frank Lloyd Wright, who became violently ill after eating dishes specially prepared for him by Gurdjieff, was later told by his doctor that Gurdjieff had eliminated his gallstones. The Women of the Rope regularly received injections from Gurdjieff of an unknown substance (perhaps “magnetized” water?) and for unknown purposes.

In the Tales, Beelzebub relates that he began his “career as a healer”[14] in Asia, becoming a “professional physician” firstly to have access to the inner world of beings of all classes and castes and secondly “to have the possibility at the same time of giving genuine medical assistance to certain of those unfortunates.”[15]

He is motivated by what he calls “love of kind” and “the commandment inculcated in me in my childhood, enjoining that ‘the highest aim and sense of human life is the striving to attain the welfare of one’s neighbor,’ and that this is possible exclusively only by the conscious renunciation of one’s own.”[16]

Thus the typical terrestrial physician is subject to the aim that Gurdjieff states in the First Series: “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.”[17]

On the other hand, the Zirlikner is presented as a model to fulfill the aim of the Second Series: “To acquaint the reader with the material required for a new creation and to prove the soundness and good quality of it.”[18]

The work involved in the possible transformation from physician/learned-being-of-new-formation to Zirlikner is identical to the work of becoming a man without quotation marks, as stated unforgettably by Gurdjieff in the final chapter of the Tales:

To possess the right to the name of “man,” one must be one. And to be such, one must first of all, with an indefatigable persistence and an unquenchable impulse of desire, issuing from all the separate independent parts constituting one’s entire common presence, that is to say, with a desire issuing simultaneously from thought, feeling, and organic instinct, work on an all-round knowledge of oneself—at the same time struggling unceasingly with one’s subjective weaknesses—and then afterwards, taking one’s stand upon the results thus obtained by one’s consciousness alone, concerning the defects in one’s established subjectivity as well as the elucidated means for the possibility of combatting them, strive for their eradication without mercy towards oneself.[19]

Gurdjieff had already given an outline of this process in his talks to his students in Russia, in the vocabulary of the Gospels and an unnamed book of aphorisms, described in In Search of the Miraculous as “to awake, to die, to be born.”[20]

To awake: Can physicians bear to see themselves in the same merciless light by which Beelzebub exposes the pride, egoism and cupidity that he saw in the modern practice of medicine—not as an intellectual exercise or by simply admitting that one is human, but accepting all the failings, both the personal and those of a would-be science that reduces humans to machines and employs an equally mechanical mindset in its approach to the diagnosis and treatment of disease?

To die: To abandon the pretense of knowledge and the idea of the physician as possessor of the missing piece to the puzzle that is the patient; to relinquish, if only internally, the undeserved merit of one’s status.

To be (re)born: To find a renewed sense of vocation, of calling, for a therapeusis that includes all of oneself and those confided to one’s care, where wisdom, being and love of kind are brought to and born of the physician-patient encounter. □

Philip Heinegg is a Family Physician in Westchester County, New York. He was introduced to the Work at the Rochester Folk Art Guild in Middlesex, NY. Living in France for six years, he was at first in the Paris groups and later in Lyon. He has been with the New York groups since 1980.