Original Translation

Gurdjieff International Review

Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson

An Objectively Impartial Criticism of the Life of Man

Table of Contents


  1. The arousing of thought
  2. Introduction: Why Beelzebub was in our solar system
  3. The cause of the delay in the falling of the ship Karnak
  4. The law of falling
  5. The system of Archangel Hariton
  6. Perpetual motion
  7. Becoming aware of genuine being-duty
  8. The impudent brat Hassein, Beelzebub’s grandson, dares to call men "slugs"
  9. The cause of the genesis of the Moon
  10. Why "men" are not men
  11. A piquant trait of the peculiar psyche of contemporary man
  12. The first "growl"
  13. Why in man’s reason fantasy may be perceived as reality
  14. The beginnings of perspectives promising nothing very cheerful
  15. The first decent of Beelzebub upon the planet Earth
  16. The relative understanding of Time
  17. The Arch-absurd: According to the assertion of Beelzebub, our Sun neither lights or heats
  18. The Arch-preposterous
  19. Beelzebub’s tales about his second descent on to the planet Earth
  20. The third flight of Beelzebub to the planet Earth
  21. The first visit of Beelzebub to India
  22. Beelzebub for the first time in Tibet
  23. The fourth personal sojourn of Beelzebub on the planet Earth
  24. Beelzebub’s flight to the planet Earth for the fifth time
  25. The Very Saintly Ashiata Shiemash, sent from Above to the Earth
  26. The Legominism concerning the deliberations of the Very Saintly Ashiata Shiemash under the title of "The Terror of the Situation"
  27. The organization for man’s existence created by the Very Saintly Ashiata Shiemash
  28. The chief culprit in the destruction of all the Very Saintly Labors of Ashiata Shiemash
  29. The fruits of former civilizations and the blossoms of the contemporary
  30. Art
  31. The sixth and last sojourn of Beelzebub on the planet Earth
  32. Hypnotism
  33. Beelzebub as professional hypnotist
  34. Russia
  35. A change in the appointed course of the falling of the transspace ship Karnak
  36. Just a wee bit more about the Germans
  37. France
  38. Religion
  39. The Holy Planet "Purgatory"
  40. Beelzebub tells how people learned and again forgot about the fundamental cosmic law of Heptaparaparshinokh
  41. The Bokharian dervish Hadji-Asvatz-Troov
  42. Beelzebub in America
  43. Beelzebub’s survey of the process of the periodic reciprocal destruction of men, or Beelzebub’s opinion of war
  44. In the opinion of Beelzebub, man’s understanding of justice is for him in the objective sense an accursed mirage
  45. In the opinion of Beelzebub, man’s extraction of electricity from Nature and its destruction during its use, is one of the chief causes of the shortening of the life of man
  46. Beelzebub explains to his grandson the significance of the form and sequence which he chose for expounding the information concerning man
  47. The inevitable result of impartial mentation
  48. From the author

Copyright © 1950 G. I. Gurdjieff
This webpage © 1998 Gurdjieff Electronic Publishing
Revision: November 7, 2007