Angels and Devils, may ye both begone

The search for a path through life

Photo: Moon over the Sparkill Church, February 2024

It's likely readers continue to have questions about my ongoing projects which mix high fantasy with ideas and insights about our spiritual nature.

Some people of course say this kind of thing ought never be done; yet in doing, so, they fail to consider the fact that Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales does exactly that; that mythology does exactly this; and that we all should, in fact, do exactly that, so that spiritual ideas penetrate more deeply into us by defeating the rationalizations of the ordinary mind, and bringing the material to places that still have a sense of wonder and love left alive in them.

Lest they die of starvation.

Different materials on the nature of Angels and Daemons—as well as devils, who are different creatures entirely — will continue to appear here in the Spiritual Periodic Table of the Elements and Gabrielle’s Field Guide to the Spiritual Minerals.

In the meantime, I’d like to say some things about angels and devils that are not embroidered with the imaginative motifs of high fantasy, but are rather direct observations of recent vintage.

By now, after 50 years of being in the Gurdjieff work I’ve heard the story about how Gurdjieff said we had an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other thousands of times. Literally. You’d think people would get tired of repeating this story in meetings and conversations, but they don't. It is a dead horse that apparently requires regular beatings in order to stay down.