The Sacred Ischmetch: A Vision of Gurdjieff’s Human Evolution

Now after six days Jesus took Peter, James, and John his brother, led them up on a high mountain by themselves; and He was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and His clothes became as white as the light. (Matthew 17:1-2)

In Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, G.I. Gurdjieff does not simply sketch another cosmology. He unveils a mythopoetic anthropology so radical that even its most luminous concepts—like the Sacred Ischmetch—have gone largely unnoticed, dismissed as esoteric ornament rather than what they truly are: a vision of human destiny.

For in Ischmetch we glimpse nothing less than Gurdjieff’s ultimate eschatology—the telos of man as a conscious, self-evolving organism, a being transfigured beyond the tyranny of death, decay, and ordinary cosmic law. This is no spiritual metaphor. It is the concrete possibility of a perfected humanity.

The Fulfilled Human according to Cosmic Law

Gurdjieff casts humanity not as an accident of evolution, but as a “three-brained being” designed for radical transformation. By lawful cosmic principle (Fulasnitamnian), our proper duration was meant to be sufficient to develop not only the physical body but, at least, the Kesdjan Body (Astral or middle part of the Soul):

“...they began to have the same duration of existence as all normal three-brained beings arising everywhere in our Universe… they also should then have existed without fail until their ‘second-being-body-Kesdjan’ had been completely coated in them and finally perfected by Reason up to the sacred ‘Ischmetch.’” (Beelzebub’s Tales, p. 437)

Here, Ischmetch is revealed not as an aberration of saints or mystics, but the very normal destiny of humanity—lost only after the cosmic catastrophe of the Kundabuffer. Humanity was intended for divinization: beings whose reason and substance are no longer dependent on planetary energies but on the very life of God.

Theophany of Sound and Sight: Divine Resonance in Ischmetch

To attain Ischmetch is to awaken new organs of perception. Such beings can hear and see the tonal fabric of creation itself:

“And only those three-brained beings who perfect their highest being-part to the state of what is called ‘Ischmetch’ become able to perceive and distinguish all the mentioned number of blendings and tonalities…” (pp. 469–70)

This is not poetic hyperbole. Gurdjieff describes an ontological tuning—an attunement to the very harmonics of the Divine Word, the “emanations of the Most Most Holy Sun Absolute.” Such beings resonate with creation itself, save for the one final vibration reserved for the CREATOR. In Christian terms, this is theosis: becoming a living instrument of the Divine Symphony.

The Metaphysical Shift: Living on Divine Substances

Perhaps the most audacious claim of all: the Ischmetch being no longer lives on bread, nor even on cosmic energies mediated by stars and planets, but on the direct influx of the Divine Source:

“...that being-state when the existence of a being already becomes dependent... only on those substances which arise directly from the manifestations of the Most Most Holy Prime Source Itself...” (p. 1148)

This is not metaphor but metabolism. Ischmetch marks the literal transubstantiation of the human organism. The soul becomes a new energetic body, infused with higher substances—an anticipation of Paul’s “spiritual body” (sōma pneumatikon, 1 Cor. 15:44). Gurdjieff here offers not mysticism but biochemistry of the Divine.

Death Reversed: The Conscious Rascooarno

Ordinary death (Rascooarno) is a disintegration. But for the perfected being, death becomes a voluntary act:

“…the process of the sacred Rascooarno may also proceed with them, but only by their own wish; and secondly, their highest being-body is taken directly to the holy planet Purgatory.” (p. 1149)

Such a being does not die. He chooses transition. Conscious Rascooarno is not an ending but a passage into divine participation. It echoes the Christian promise of the beatific vision, but here expressed in Gurdjieff’s rigorous metaphysics: the soul, now crystallized, enters eternity by its own freedom.

In Gurdjieff’s mythos, the Ischmetch is one of the most sacred words for human possibility. It is not fantasy but destiny; not automatic but earned; not merely individual but cosmic. To recover this destiny is to recover the true gospel of the human being: that we were made not to perish, but to participate in God.