Toast to the Idiots.
Gurdjieff’s "Toast to the Idiots", with its 'Science of Idiotism', was perhaps his strangest and most innovative method of teaching. At regular ritualistic meals which he hosted, formulary toasts were drunk to successive categories of 'idiot' sometimes with improvised 'additions' illuminating the specific idiocy and type.
All guests - excepting of course those in the particular category being saluted - were then obligated to drink the toast in Armagnac or vodka. Gurdjieff introduced his Toast to the Idiots in 1922. Although not divesting 'idiot' of its pejorative sense, he re-invested it with the meaning of individuality (from Greek root meaning "I make my own").
Though idiocy was universal - God himself being the Unique Idiot – a subsidiary differentiation afford a human typology once 'poetic' and profound. Each pupil relying simply on intuition, was initially required to choose his own idiot from among the first 12:
1 ordinary;
2 super;
3 arch;
4 hopeless;
5 compassionate;
6 squirming;
7 square;
8 round;
9 zigzag;
10 enlightened;
11 doubting;
12 swaggering.
Since Gurdjieff's meals demanded a mobilised attention, and were never remotely orgiastic, toasts beyond twelve were seldom even approached. The subsequent order of idiots is believed to be:
13 born;
14 patented;
15 psychopathic;
16 polyhedral.
Although idiots 1 - 16 might seem to occupy a plateau of being, only differentiated behaviourally, there are hints of a desirable evolution to the proximate type - from hopeless to compassionate, but backwards from hopeless to arch. Certainly each type, of itself, offered scope for evolution or involution.
The distinction most allude is that between the subjectively hopeless idiot, aware of his nullity and hence candidate for an honourable death, and the objectively hopeless idiot, enmeshed in egoism and hence doomed to perish like a dog. (Armenian "merneel", human death; 'satkeel', animal death). Consider the passage: "Zigzag is high idiot, goes this way, that way.
Takes different I's for reminding factor. Struggles against 'merde' he knows he is... If he does this, then I admire him with all my presence! But ordinary zigzag idiot with five Fridays in the week is shit of shit".
Idiots 17 -21 constituted a spiritual hierarchy, reflecting progressive gradations of 'objective reason'.
Idiot 18 represented the highest development which a human being could reach, but in order to attain it, he had first voluntarily to descend again from 17 to category 1, the ordinary idiot.
Idiots 19 and 20 were reserved for the sons of God.
The Toast to the Idiots was discontinued immediately on Gurdjieff's death in 1949.
"Gurdjieff a Biography", James Moore
