Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson

Chapter.Page

Amambakhlootr

 

34 Russia

34.648-9

“Well, my boy, when still in, as your contemporary favorites say, the ‘dim ancient past,’ a wise and learned being by name ‘Amambakhlootr,’ also from the continent Asia there, once clearly constated during his conscious observations of various facts proceeding around him, that this ‘oily-something’ which collects in the pores of the skin, has also a maleficent influence on the general functioning of the whole planetary body, he began to elucidate and seek for means for wiping out at least this evil.

34.649

“As a result of the investigations and long deliberations of this Amambakhlootr, and of several other also learned beings who then became his followers and began to help him, they arrived at the conclusion and became convinced of the impossibility of obtaining that beings similar to themselves should not wear clothes, and that it was necessary to seek a method for artificially eliminating from the pores of the skin these remains of the ‘second-food’ by means of implanting in the psyche of the beings around them some or other being-usage, which in the course of time would become indispensably necessary to them and in this way enter into their habits and customs.

34.649

“And that these Asiatic learned beings with this great Amambakhlootr at their head then experimentally elucidated and actualized this in practice, well, this served as a beginning of those hammams which exist there in places even till now.

34.649

“At that time, they during the learned experiments elucidated among other things, that by ordinary washing, even with hot water, it was impossible to obtain the elimination of these deposits from the pores of the skin, as these excretions of the planetary body are found not on the surface of the skin but in the depths of the pores.

34.649

“Their further elucidatory experiments showed them that the cleansing of the ‘pores’ of the skin from these deposits was possible only by means of slow warming, thanks to which, this deposited ‘oily-something’ acquires the possibility of gradually dissolving and of being eliminated from the pores of the skins of beings.

34.649-50

“Well, for this same purpose, they then invented and actualized in practice special rooms which later came to be called hammams, the sense and significance of which they knew how to spread among the beings of the whole continent in such a way that in the psyche of all the Asiatic beings, the need was implanted in the process of their existence for the use of these rooms for the given procedure.