Jungian Commentary on Gurdjieff’s Lunar Paragraphs

LIGHTHOUSE EDITIONS - GURDJIEFF RELATED BOOKS CONFERENCE Saturday 5 March 2005

Held at the Warburg Institute, School of Advanced Study, London University, Woburn Square, London, UK

This one day academic conference explored papers from a number of disciplines which looked at readings of a tale by Gurdjieff in which Beelzebub tells his grandson Hassein about the moon. (See Chapter Three of Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson pp 56-65) Lighthouse Editions plan to publish the conference papers and summaries of the discussions which followed them on the website and later in book form, this paper from Kenneth W. James, Ph.D. was read and discussed in his absence, is the first of those papers to be published on the website.

In examining the passage under consideration at this Conference from the perspective of Jungian Analytical Psychology, it is acknowledged that any treatment from this or any other psychological perspective is intended to be strictly amplificative, not in any way reductive of the complexity found in the Tales. In previous work, I addressed the importance of this acknowledgement [Ref 1], since there seems to be a natural but misguided tendency toward reductive oversimplification of Gurdjieff’s imagery, as if one might work less and still meet him in the place of inner effort.

This paper addresses the passage in terms of the structure and dynamics of the psyche as understood by Jung, in order to appreciate more profoundly the intricacy of psychological understanding with which Gurdjieff infused his writings. For purposes of brevity, the following points are offered with respect to this passage, and are elaborated in the paragraphs which follow:

1. The Moon represents the realm of the psyche called by Jung the personal unconscious.
2. The inhabitants of the Moon represent the complexes.
3. This extract expresses the energetic dynamic of the personal unconscious, explaining in symbolic form the reason for the elusiveness and tenacity of the complexes in spite of the harshness of the personal unconsciousness’ general atmosphere.


In other writings [Ref 2] I have considered these points in relationship to two further elements, which I offer here for purposes of contextualization, although their detailed discussion is beyond the scope of this passage and the purpose of this conference.


4. The influence which the Moon has on the Earth and its inhabitants, and the necessity for the beings of the Earth to feed the moon in one way or another, represent the dynamic relationship between Ego-consciousness and the complexes of the personal unconscious.
5. Taken as a whole, Beelzebub’s recounting of his tales to his grandson represents the dynamic relationship to be attained and maintained between The Self and the Ego, so that the necessity of feeding the Moon may be satisfied without loss of one’s soul. This relationship is facilitated within a Jungian framework through the work of analysis, and from the perspective of Gurdjieff’s teachings by participating in the three lines of Work.

From a Jungian perspective, it is possible to consider the Moon to be the realm of the personal unconscious, and the inhabitants of the Moon to be representations of the complexes [Ref 3], defined in Jungian psychology as feeling-toned sets of ideas and images, with an archetypal core [Ref 4]. In this passage, Beelzebub explains to his grandson exactly what the nature of the complex is, and how the complexes are able to exert their influence on the thoughts, feelings and actions of an apparently “conscious” person, in order to become more fully integrated into the person’s psychic structure.

The complex arises in the realm of the personal unconscious through a necessary process of repression or suppression of psychic material, in order to retain unprocessed experiences for later integration. The personal unconscious is a portion of the psyche consisting of a structured collection of experiences which were at one time present to the Ego, but which were not fully integrated at the time of their initial appearance. What the Ego could not fully integrate is placed in a repository (the personal unconscious) in order to be dealt with at another time. In psychological jargon, this material “splits off”, much as the Moon split off from the Earth after the latter’s collision with the comet Kondoor. Formed in this accidental way, the personal unconscious ought to be a haphazard collection of material, composed as it is of “leftovers” from life experience. Surprisingly, clinical manifestations of unconscious contents, called in psychoanalytic circles “neuroses” or “symptoms”, reveal that the personal unconscious is not a haphazard collection of contents at all, but a well-organized part of the psyche, composed of “sets” of unconscious material called complexes, each of which at times becomes autonomous and capable of overpowering the Ego. The formative element in the organization of the personal unconscious arises from the a priori organization of a deeper, more chthonic dimension of the psyche called the collective unconscious, the domain of the archetypes that form the organizational cores of the many complexes in the personal unconscious. The complexes act as though they are organisms of the unconscious, taking energy from the Ego in order to sustain their underground life. The relationship between the Ego and the complexes is parasitic in a sense, in that the complexes are sustained by taking psychic energy that would otherwise be available to the Ego, but the Ego does not gain anything from this interaction, except continuance of waking sleep in the Work sense. The “frail planetary bodies” of the complexes need to take psychic energy from the embodied Ego in order to exert their influence in the space/time dimension of human life. Thus in spite of their frail planetary bodies, the complexes have adapted to the conditions of the personal unconscious, and sustain themselves there.

The complexes override the consciousness of the Ego, causing the individual to engage in activities that wreak havoc in the well-ordered life [Ref 5]. In the usual situation, the Ego is left to clean up the mess caused by the discharge of complexes, and in the best of circumstances this dynamic engenders in the Ego a sense of relativization to the energies of the unconscious in general, and leads the Ego to seek a connection to a higher order of being: The Self, the center of the psyche and the organizer of life experiences. Becoming aware of the complexes and how they interact with waking consciousness is a necessary step in the process of individuation, the term used in Jungian psychology to refer to the growth of consciousness necessary to live in harmony with one’s experiences always and everywhere.

The beings on the Moon are ceaselessly active, and in particular their tunneling activity is related to the fact that the Moon arose unexpectedly out of a calamity that caused part of the Earth to break off, creating a mad climate in which these creatures must live. This suggests the self-sustaining activity of the complexes of the personal unconscious, which sometimes “go underground,” eluding analytic reflection and resisting integration by the Ego. The “glorious weather” referred to in the passage seems to denote the periods of heightened defensiveness on the part of the Ego against awareness of the contents of the personal unconscious. When the Ego defends, the complexes flourish. These defenses permit the complexes to gain psychic energy (“the various products for their first being food greatly in excess of their general need…”) to sustain themselves during the periods of climatic madness. The reader is told that the lack of climatic harmony on the Moon is due to the fact that the Higher Powers did not prearrange conditions there. This mirrors the dynamic underlying the formation of personal complexes: the Ego, unconnected from its archetypal “Higher Powers” which reside in and with The Self, cannot integrate all the experiences coming to it in life, and so the complexes form unconsciously and establish their own means of protecting themselves from the seemingly chaotic nature of the personal unconscious. Only when the Ego connects to The Self can the activity of the complexes be discerned, understood, and attenuated.

A case may be made for considering the relationship between Hassein and Beelzebub to be an exemplification of this hard-to-sustain connection between the Ego complex and The Self, in Jungian terms. From the perspective of Jung’s Analytical Psychology, Hassein [Ref 6] may be interpreted as a symbolic representation of the Ego complex, the center of ordinary consciousness and the place from which the human person interacts with consensus reality. Beelzebub, on the other hand, represents The Self in Jungian terms, defined as “an archetypal image of a human being’s fullest potential and the unity of the personality as a whole.” [Ref 7] Beelzebub’s tales to Hassein mediate the connection between the grandfather an grandson, and mirror the dynamism between Ego and Self in our own psyche. Through these means, this Ego-Self axis (as this connection was named by Erich Neumann, an early interpreter of Jung’s thought) is made more vital and capable of sustaining the Ego amidst the exigencies of ordinary life. One of the most important elements which the Ego must understand in order to live consciously and participate in the process of Individuation, is the role of the personal unconscious (the Moon) as it relates energetically to the Ego. This tale provides important imagery to facilitate this understanding.

[Ref 1] James, K. (1996) The Way of the Sly One: The Psychology of Our Possible Evolution in the writings of C.G. Jung and G.I. Gurdjieff. (Audiotape program). Evanston, IL, U.S.A.: C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago. An example of this reductive tendency is seen in some of the popular literature on the enneagram, which distorts Gurdjieff’s teaching through oversimplification.

[Ref 2] James, K. (in process) Beelzebub and the Self: The Harmonious Relationship between the teachings of G.I. Gurdjieff and C.G. Jung.

[Ref 3] From a Work perspective, the complexes function much like the “little I’s” discussed in Ouspensky’s Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution.

[Ref 4] Samuels, A, Shorter, B and Plaut, F. (1986) A Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. [Ref 5] In Work terms, the Ego becomes identified with the complex.

[Ref 6] Wellbeloved reminds us that the name “Hassein” has the same Arabic root ‘hsn” as Mohammed’s grandsons; this root “contains the meaning ‘to improve’. Thus, the Ego improves through its connection to The Self. (Wellbeloved, S. (2002). Gurdjieff, Astrology and Beelzebub’s Tales. New Paltz, NY: Solar Bound Press, p. 131.

[Ref 7] Samuels, Shorter and Plaut, op.cit., p. 135