3.7: Centres of gravity and body types

You’re nothing but a pack of cards! —Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland 

I do not recall reading anywhere in Gurdjieff’s or Ouspensky’s works the idea of body types or centres of gravity. The idea of body types appears to derive from Rodney Collin’s Theory of Celestial Influence and that of centres of gravity is, as far as I can tell, an innovation by Robert Burton, although I do not know for certain. 

In essence both sets of ideas are peripheral to the aim of the fourth way, but they have their uses. Both sets of ideas provide a framework in which one can identify the mechanics of one’s ‘machine.’ This enables one better to understand one’s mechanical or automatic reactions to people and situations and thus become more forgiving and accepting of oneself and others. 

The idea of centres of gravity appears to be an embellishment on the division of the body into head, heart and guts, or intellectual centre, emotional centre and instinctive-moving centre, which is discussed in In Search of the Miraculous. Whereas Ouspensky only talks about these centres in each of us in relation to their basic functions and various speeds, the Fellowship system additionally proposes that each of us operates preferentially from one or more of these centres. In the Fellowship system each of these centres is associated with one of the suits in an ordinary deck of playing cards: clubs for instinctive centre, spades for the moving centre, hearts for the emotional centre and diamonds for the intellectual centre, with each centre further divided into head, heart and guts, or in the Fellowship nomenclature, king, queen and jack. 

Thus the moving part of the intellectual centre is the part that free-associates mechanically and stores facts, the emotional part of the intellectual centre is the part that gets excited about new knowledge, and the intellectual part of the intellectual centre can weigh up things intentionally, and can hold an idea without necessarily believing it. The intellectual part of the intellectual centre is called the king of diamonds, the emotional part is the queen and the instinctive-moving part is the jack. Similarly with the other centres, the kings of centres are the parts that can act intentionally, and while these parts do not act consciously as such, they are considered to be the gateway to consciousness and ‘higher centres,’ symbolised by the jokers.

Each part of each centre is further subdivided into king, queen and jack. Given that each centre is subdivided in this way, each of the four lower centres is divided into a total of nine subdivisions which are designated two to ten. 

Specifically the gateway to higher centres is the queen of the king of hearts, that is, the nine of hearts, that is, the emotional part of the intellectual part of the emotional centre. Such is the baroque complexity of Ouspensky’s system as embellished through the Fellowship. There is at any rate room for a St Mary figure, if she be the nine of hearts within who gives birth to the conscious being. 

So, in terms of the system I am supposed to be intellectually-centred (diamonds), but not the king of diamonds (those rare people who think deeply for what seems ages before answering a question), rather the jack, a collector of random information, a magpie (or perhaps the jack of the queen). You might already have deduced that. 

The body type theory derives from Rodney Collin’s speculations about the endocrine glands, at least what was known about them in the early 1950s. In The Theory of Celestial Influence he lists the endocrine glands that were known at the time (many more hormones have been discovered since) and associates them with the planets. He then places them on Gurdjieff’s enneagram, a nine-pointed diagram arranged around a circle (see next section). 

There are of course historical precedents for associating certain character types with the Roman gods and by association with the heavenly bodies, and it is perhaps not an unnatural stretch also to associate character types with endocrine glands. Taking the next step and associating character types with planetary influences is of course highly speculative. 

Thus we know what someone means when they talk about a jovial type, someone jocular, good-humoured and tending to the rotund. Jove is another name for Jupiter, father of the Roman gods, and Jupiter is the largest of the planets, with many moons circling it. Thus jovial types attract admirers and hangers-on (although until Galileo no-one knew about Jupiter’s moons, and even then Galileo only identified four of them). Examples might include Samuel Johnson who was at the centre of coffee-house intellectual debate in the eighteenth century, or Shakespeare’s fictitious character Falstaff. Rodney Collin then associates Jupiter with the anterior pituitary gland, a gland that modulates the activity of a number of other glands, including the thyroid, adrenals, and ovaries. 

Similarly we can talk about martial types after Mars, god of war: people of a certain directness and impulsiveness of action. We think of Alexander the Great cutting the Gordian knot with his sword instead of untying it. Collin associates the martial type with the adrenal glands, source of the ‘fight or flight’ hormone adrenaline. Similarly Rodney Collin manages to associate other types, lunar, mercurial, venusian and so on with various of the endocrine glands, some more plausibly than others. 

Advisers in psychology and business sometimes use other classifications of type, such as other variations on Gurdjieff’s enneagram, or the entirely different Myers-Briggs classification. However such classifications are based on observation of manifestations only and so are bound to be somewhat arbitrary and circular. Lunar types tend to be solitary and introverted. Because I tend to be solitary and introverted I am a lunar type. There is nothing underpinning this, unless the link with the endocrine glands is correct, for which I know of no evidence whatever (the lunar type is supposed to be associated with the pancreas—I’m not sure why—insulin puts sugar back in the cells as lunars go back in their shells?). There is even less reason to suppose that the endocrine glands are under the influence of the planets. But as a way of helping us accept ourselves and others as we are, it has its uses. 

From childhood I was shy and under-confident and even as a much more confident adult I do not mix easily with others. I find small-talk difficult and it is a skill I have had to acquire through effort and practice. Thus to understand that this is simply my ‘type’ was something of a relief. My type is neither good nor bad, just one of many. As the song says, ‘I am who I’m meant to be, this is me.’ 

As with the ‘centres of gravity,’ such classifications can be helpful but in my view not essential, curiosities perhaps useful at times. No type is said to be superior to any other in terms of spiritual understanding, but it may determine what we love and what we seem naturally good at. 

Up to a point there is some truth in the idea of centres of gravity and perhaps body types, but I do not think that should pre-determine one’s fate. That I am not instinctively centred may account for why I am not a chef, but that does not stop me from learning to cook meals that are accounted tasty by my family. I have seen a class of children learning to dance and it is obvious by the age of four or five which ones already seem to have dancing in them and which are a little awkward. Even so I saw one who at age ten seemed lacking in grace, two years on perform a solo with considerable beauty. Sufficient love of something and sufficient effort can produce surprising results.