Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson or An Objectively Impartial Criticism of the Life of Man is the first volume of the 'All and Everything' trilogy written by the Greek-Armenian mystic G. I. Gurdjieff. The All and Everything trilogy also includes 'Meetings with Remarkable Men' (first published in 1963) and' Life Is Real Only Then, When 'I Am'' (first privately printed in 1974).
Because the book was intended to be the main study tool for his teachings, and because the idea of work is central to those teachings, Gurdjieff went to great lengths in order to increase the effort needed to read and understand it. Gurdjieff himself once said, “I bury the bone so deep that the dogs have to scratch for it." The book treats of an enormous number of subjects and questions. It is a vast allegorical myth structure in a literary form all its own.
From the foreword of G. I. Gurdjieffs “Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson”:
“All written according to entirely new principles of logical reasoning and directed toward the accomplishment of the following three fundamental tasks: FIRST SERIES To destroy, mercilessly and without any compromise whatever, in the mentation and feelings of the reader, the beliefs and views, by centuries rooted in him, about everything existing in the world. SECOND SERIES To acquaint the reader with the material required for a new creation and to prove the soundness and good quality of it. THIRD SERIES To assist the arising, in the mentation and in the feelings of the reader, of a veritable, nonfantastic representation not of that illusory world which he now perceives, but of the world existing in reality.”
Beelzebub’s Tales is included in Martin Seymour-Smith‘s 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written, with the comment that it is “…the most convincing fusion of Eastern and Western thought has yet been seen.
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