Good and Evil in Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, Part VI: Lentrohamsanin

  

 Part VI of a seven-part series

Лентро Хамсанин, phonetically, Lentrohamsanin.  

The phonemes for this character are composed of fragments of Lenin, Trotsky, and xamca,  which means “anchovy” in Tajik. We can suppose Gurdjieff may be indicating that the character’s propositions “taste fishy.” 

Lentrohamsanin is said to have had an inner “double center of gravity,” specifically cited for the reason that he developed objective reason. This interesting phrase is not used anywhere else in the book, but it bears contemplation. 

He records his teaching on 100 buffalo hides, an indication that it’s both “super”-superficial and a giant pile of BS. 

Lentrohamsanin, who destroys the results of Ashiata Shiemash’s labors, bases his appeal on human ideas of “freedom,”  which seize the population and ultimately leading to war —an action which Gurdjieff specifically mentions elsewhere as the consequence of solioonensius. 

There’s an obvious connection here also worthy of further consideration: Lentrohamsanin’s teaching is the result of what should have been a higher sacred process that goes wrong when appropriated by members of a lower order. In other words, Lentrohamsanin himself recapitulates Beelzebub’s cardinal sin: “we ourselves will be masters of our own circumstances and no longer they, who rule our lives…” He thought he knew better than God:

“But then, owing to his youthful and still unformed Reason, as well as to his callow and impetuous mentation with its unequally flowing associations, that is, a mentation based on a limited understanding—which is natural for beings who have not yet become fully responsible—Beelzebub once saw something in the government of the world that seemed to him "illogical" and, having found support among his comrades, unformed beings like himself, interfered in what was none of his business.

Thanks to the force and impetuosity of Beelzebub's nature, his intervention, supported by his comrades, soon captured all minds and brought the central kingdom of the Megalocosmos to the brink of revolution.” 

This passage from Chapter 2 of Beelzebub’s Tales is, for all intents and purposes, an exact recapitulation of Lentrohamsanin’s actions.  But for a single detail, Beelzebub himself is Lentrohamsanin; the only difference between the two is that Beelzebub, ever the cynic and ruthless critic of all that he observes, finds himself at the beginning of the story on a path to redemption; Lentrohamsanin, on the other hand, is irredeemable. (How very apt it is to label Gurdjieff a cynic; the appellation, after all, originally meant “doglike, churlish;” and Gurdjieff’s famous aim in his writing was to “bury bone deeper.”)

What is the only essential difference between the two? Lentrohamsanin lacks objective conscience.

Lentrohamsanin’s transgression is a collapse back into the subjective on the part of the already objective: in other words, the danger of this is perpetual, perhaps no matter how high the level of inner development. 

And, indeed, it results in what Gurdjieff would have called objective evil. It results in a population influenced by powerful outer circumstances and divided by hatred. Civil war ensues. The image of an inner state divided against itself arises; this is a mirror of the struggle in a human being between the “new ideas” and the “old ideas” which Gurdjieff mentioned on his deathbed. 

The first principal lesson in this parable is the danger of being influenced by another, no matter how much authority they may seem to have. The second principle lesson is about the value of tradition and community, easily destroyed by the combination of suggestibility and the arrival of outside ideas in the absence of critical evaluation.

The net result? Even the highest part of an individual (Lentrohamsanin himself) may do such great damage that it crystallizes at a level where it can never be undone. Beelzebub himself, in the course of his tales, avoids this fate: but the cautionary element for all, even Beelzebub himself, is impossible to avoid. One might say that Lentrohamsanin is not just the “anti-Ashiata Shiemash,” but the “anti-Beelzebub.”

Various etymological roots of the word Hasnamuss from Persian, Turkmenistan, and Kurdish phonemes bring us meanings connected to miserliness, that which is mean, vile, or bad; also, something to do with honor or reputation. Roots for various words meaning “peculiar” or “particular to” are also present. The rough portmanteau translation of the word might be “uniquely powerful and vile individual.” 

The word implies of itself an objective force of evil that goes against objectivity itself; and given Gurdjieff’s cosmology, with its unabashed adoption of hierarchies of angels, we can’t avoid a picture of that very same “heaven” and “hell” which he seems to dismiss in other parts of the book. It is one of the peculiar and intentional features of Gurdjieff’s writing that he embeds his own inner struggle and contradictory ideas within his tales of the cosmos, mirroring the need for critical and objective reasoning. The device forces we the readers into a world where we are inexorably drawn into that selfsame struggle.

This means that looking for consistency in Gurdjieff’s cosmology and mythology is a profound mistake: the inconsistencies in it are there to reflect, in literary form, the exact same forces he speaks of. The conflicts are inherent and not resolvable by anything except conscious reasoning; and thus, taking any single statement Gurdjieff makes about a matter is already wrong. His interest is not in having us believe one thing or another that he says; his interest is oft in provoking active mentation by saying two different, perhaps even ridiculous, things and forcing us to live in the middle of them. One might surmise that approximately half of them are nonsense; and a close reading of the book will bear that out even for the average reader. This process closely mirrors the way in which he engaged in practical work with his students.

It would be a useful device, by the way, for the reader to conceive of the book as an exclusively inner cosmology cast as comprehensively outer mythology. All of the events described in it take place “on various planets;” that is, in physical worlds; yet the discussion about the events takes place on a spaceship, that is, within the metaphysical realm, from a point of view decisively removed from the storyline. The spaceship Karnak is a place of objective mentation about outer events.

 In this sense of the book as an inner cosmology, every character in the book represents a part of the psyche and spiritual body of a single individual. We all have an Ashiata Shiemash and a Lentrohamsanin in us; they represent the function of the parts that bring man’s soul (his conscious action) into contact with God (Ashiata Shiemash) and the parts that bring man’s soul into contact with the ordinary world. 

Think of the book, then, as a story about a single individual— yourself – and your inner order. In one way or another, every single tale has something to do with that. Believing in any of it as a record of actual outer events is a mistake. We might say,

“This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.”

Put in the simplest of terms, the struggle between Ashiata Shiemash and Lentrohamsanin is a struggle between inner good and inner evil. That struggle, as it happens, is provoked by the inward flow of outer circumstances, contrary to the inward flow of a higher influence in the form of divine energy. This struggle is a recapitulation, in complex mythological form, of Meister Eckhart’s analysis of the structure of man’s soul found in Sermon One. The third or reconciling force in this struggle between two opposing flows is a human being’s own awareness, which must take responsibility for its place between these two worlds in order to discriminate. Ultimately, as with the case of the population of Babylon and other countries confronted with Lentrohamsanin’s teachings (the influences of the outer world, which appeared to have great authority) one has to be free of the outer influences— and perhaps most especially the ones which promise freedom. 

The irony, once appreciated, is beautifully delivered.

May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.