Gurdjieff on Judaism

Among the ancient religious streams surveyed in Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, Gurdjieff’s portrayal of Judaism—or as he terms it, the Hebrew religion—stands as a foundational archetype, both revered for its normality-loving practicality and mourned for its swift adulteration by human egoism. Emerging from the divine actualization of Saint Moses, this teaching arrives not as abstract mysticism but as a toolkit for decrystallizing the maleficent residues of the organ Kundabuffer, those inherited illusions that fragment the three-brained being.

Yet, like its successors, Judaism becomes a cosmic tragedy: a pure vessel swiftly spiced with fantasy and policy, its rituals enduring as echoes of wisdom amid encroaching mechanization. In this post, we explore Beelzebub’s narration of Moses’ mission, the esoteric hygiene of Jewish customs, and—where the threads intertwine—its intimate kinship with the Christian revelation of Jesus Christ, revealing how both illuminate Gurdjieff’s vision of sacred labor against the tide of forgetting.

Gurdjieff’s Appreciation of Moses and the Hebrew Foundation

In the grand cosmic critique of Chapter 38, Beelzebub recounts the Hebrew religion as one of five surviving faiths, each a fragmented inheritance from "survived totalities" of ancient inspirations (p. 699). But Judaism alone claims direct lineage from a Sacred Individual intentionally actualized from Above: the Saint Moses, whose planetary body arose in Egypt "a little after my fourth personal sojourn" on Earth (p. 700). Here, Gurdjieff elevates Moses not as a mythic lawgiver but as a pragmatic emissary, tasked with furnishing "exact and corresponding indications for ordinary existence" to counteract the Kundabuffer’s lingering poisons—those predispositions toward illusion, hatred, and self-deception that warp the soul’s potential for Objective Reason.

This mission unfolds during the Exodus, a deliberate selection of a "race" from Egypt’s throng to the Land of Canaan, imprinting a teaching suited to the era’s mental perfection. Beelzebub praises Moses’ counsels as a blueprint for normalcy: harmonious being-functions that, if actualized, could gradually dissolve crystallizations and forestall new ones.

In Gurdjieff’s cosmology, such revelations serve the Most Holy Sun Absolute by harmonizing planetary energies; Moses’ work, then, is evolutionary prophylaxis, guiding fragmented humanity toward conscious labor and intentional suffering. Yet even in this origin, a shadow falls: the first generation, ever prone to bobtailed reason, begins "gradually to mix into all the counsels... such a mass of what are called ‘spices’" that the saint "could not with all his wish recognize anything of his own" (p. 700). These additions borrow from earlier fantasies—like the poppy-seed doctrines of King Konuzion—transforming pure indication into a hotchpotch of profitable myth.

Compare this to Beelzebub’s tender regard for Jesus Christ, the next Sacred Individual actualized among Moses’ chosen lineage (p. 701). Where Moses offers indications for ordinary existence, Jesus embodies their inner fulfillment: not mere hygiene for the body and psyche, but the theosis of divine-human union.

Both are messengers of HIS ENDLESSNESS, yet Judaism lays the root—the doctrinal soil from which Christianity sprouts, adapting "only its outer details according to the degree of mental development of the contemporaries of Jesus Christ" (p. 1002). Gurdjieff thus honors Judaism as the unadorned precursor, its Judaic doctrine providing "almost the whole" basis for the Christian religion, complete with provisions for "both... the soul and... the body" (p. 1002).

The Corruption of Judaism and the Esoteric Hygiene of Its Rites

Alas, as with all terrestrial faiths, Judaism succumbs to the Hasnamussian impulse: that egoic distortion where followers "strip" teachings "much as the Russian Sidor ‘stripped’ his goats" (p. 706-7). Beelzebub foresees its final destruction not through cataclysm but inexorable erosion—fueled by "organic hatred" sown by maleficent policy, dooming it to "croak... with a crash" (p. 733). This degeneration mirrors the broader process of strangeness afflicting humanity’s psyche, where even traces of hope are swept away by secular hearths like universities that "burn everything acquired during decades and centuries" upon their altars (p. 708).

Yet amid this lament, Gurdjieff unveils Judaism’s enduring genius through its rituals, particularly the rite of sooniat or circumcision—a custom so vital it permeates Christianity and the Mohammedan religion alike (p.1003). In a digressive masterpiece of Chapter 42, Beelzebub traces this practice to Moses’ incomparable sage-ship, born from observing the scourge of Moordoorten (onanism) among his charges during the desert trek (p. 1003-4).

Drawing on Atlantean-derived Egyptian lore from the Akhaldan brotherhood, Moses discerns how human invention—clothing—unwittingly sabotages Great Nature’s design. The organ’s waste substance, Kulnabo (a volatilizing secretion unknown to contemporary medicine), accumulates beneath the praeputium penis, breeding bacteria, perspiration, and itching that lures children into premature pleasant sensations, entrenching psychic disharmony and barring normal mentation in adulthood (pp. 1004-6).

Moses counters with two sacred rites: Sikt ner chorn for boys (severing the frenum penis to enable free movement and natural cleansing) and Tzel putz kann for girls (a female analog, later discontinued post-Solomon) (pp. 1007-9). These are no mere tribal marks but esoteric hygiene: mechanical safeguards restoring Nature’s providence against the Ooamonvanosinian process’s abuse. Beelzebub, the self-proclaimed good diagnostician, affirms their efficacy—"this terrible children’s disease... is scarcely ever found among those children upon whom this rite has been performed" (p. 1008)—contrasting it with the negligence of Moordoortenist psychopaths whose rote education fosters mechanized souls.

Here, Judaism’s practicality shines in parallel with Christianity’s deeper call. Early Christians, inheriting this Judaic custom, observed it "obligatorily and strictly" until it faded, much as they would later mechanize Jesus’ inner resurrection into outer creed (p. 1009). Both faiths, Gurdjieff implies, begin with body-soul equilibrium: Moses’ rites as prophylactic armor, Jesus’ gospel as the sword piercing illusion. Yet where Judaism preserves outer hygiene and social equilibrium, Christianity demands conscious participation—the Elmooarno of sacred union, not mere prevention of itch.

Prophetic Warnings: The Shared Decline of Judaism and Christianity

Beelzebub’s etherograms paint a chilling vista of religious twilight, where Judaism’s fate foreshadows Christianity’s. The opening of a University for Jewish youths in Jerusalem— that sacred ground of Crusades and Christ’s passion—signals not renewal but erasure: a hearth where ancestral labors are incinerated for "one-and-a-half-day tasty lentil soup" (pp. 707-8).

Gurdjieff’s irony bites: the very city Christians half-destroyed to claim for their Lord now hosts Jewish scholars who deem Jesus a "fervent and sick ‘visionary’" (p. 708). Soon, Beelzebub envisions, the Holy Sepulcher yields to a parking place for those machines which... drive them crazy (p. 708-9), as humanity’s record speeds—325 miles an hour!—contract their world to triviality (p. 709).

This sacrilege unites the faiths in peril: both founded ‘from-bits-taken-here-and-there’ from the teachings of two genuine messengers, yet stripped until "they will no longer stop... but... entirely destroy even their very traces" (pp. 706-7). Judaism, burdened by policy-forged enmity, teeters toward oblivion; Christianity, the repository of great hopes, crumbles under the same archstrangeness. Gurdjieff’s tragedy is cosmic: religions as evolutionary fulcrums, now mechanized into mental perversity—from ancient Tanguori to modern theosophists (p. 734).

In this shared unraveling, however, glimmers Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way: a call beyond form to essence. If Judaism’s rites guard the vessel, Christianity fills it with wine—the divine-human ferment Moses prepared but could not pour.

Echoes of Moses in the Way of Conscious Being

Judaism, in Gurdjieff’s lens, is the ur-revelation: Moses’ Tookha Tes Nalool Pan (quintessence of reflections) a manual for the three-brained being’s rectification, its customs a bridge from Atlantis’ lost wisdom to our fragmented now. Honored as Christianity’s root—transmitting not just doctrine but excellent customs like circumcision for peaceful and happy existence (p. 1002-3)—it whispers of what unadulterated faith might yet reclaim: hygiene for the soul’s organs, against the Kundabuffer’s itch.

Yet Gurdjieff reserves his deepest full-of-hope gaze for Christ, whose teaching, rooted in Moses, might even perhaps have suited these contemporary people—those who "will blink only if you poke his eye with a rafter" (p. 1002-3). Judaism endures as adaptive prophylaxis; Christianity, as transformative fire. Together, they map the sacred labor: outer rite yielding to inner resurrection, both imperiled yet invitational. In an age of parking-lot pieties, Beelzebub’s tales urge us: actualize the indications, lest the spices consume the wine.