Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson

38 Religion

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“Now as regards the fourth great religion existing there now, which arose several centuries after the Christian religion, and was founded on the teaching of the full-of-hope Saint Mohammed, this religion at first spread there widely: and it might perhaps have become eventually a ‘hearth of hope and reconciliation’ for them all if these strange beings had not stirred this also into a hotchpotch.

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“On the one hand its followers also mixed into it something from the fantastic theory of the Babylonian dualists, but, on the other hand, the ‘elders of the church’ of this religion, called in this case ‘Sheiks-Islamists,’ themselves invented and added to it many things about the blessings of the notorious ‘paradise,’ which as it were, existed ‘in the other world,’ such blessings as perhaps could never even have entered the head of the chief Governor of Purgatory, His All-Quarters-Maintainer the Archcherub Helkgematios, even if he were deliberately to try to imagine them.

39 The Holy Planet “Purgatory”

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“So then, from that time on, this holy planet arose with the name of Purgatory, and its chief organization and government was undertaken at His own wish by Our All-Quarters-Maintainer, the Great Arch Cherub Helkgematios, that same Great Helkgematios who after the creation of the World first merited the Sacred Anklad, that is, first acquired that degree of Reason which alone it is in general possible for an independent Individual, whatever his nature, to attain, and which is third in degree after the Absolute Reason of our ENDLESSNESS.

44 In the Opinion of Beelzebub, Man’s Understanding of Justice Is for Him in the Objective Sense an Accursed Mirage

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“And so when I learned of the permanent place of their existence and to which posts they were found worthy, I, from then on, according to my promise, sent every quarter of our year to Tooilan an exact copy of all my written summaries of those observations which I continued to make. Rather many years passed since the time I began to send Tooilan these etherograms and I personally did not know what became of them until I received information about these same turbulent events on the planet Purgatory. It transpired that the great Governor of the holy planet Purgatory, His All-Quarters-Maintainer the Arch-cherub Helkgematios, having once by chance learned that one of the assistants of the Governor of the etherogram station, Tooilan, periodically received from the solar system Ors very long etherograms from his father, evinced a desire to become acquainted with their contents, and having become acquainted with them, he not only became interested in them himself, but even commanded your uncle Tooilan always to reproduce the contents of these etherograms in the common planetary ‘Toolookhterzinek,’¹ so that some of the ‘higher being-bodies’ dwelling on the holy planet might, if they wished, for a rest, be informed of the psyche of those peculiar three-brained beings breeding in one of the very remote corners of the Megalocosmos.

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“Your uncle Tooilan afterwards always did so. Whenever he received etherograms from me he always reproduced their contents in the common planetary Toolookhterzinek, and in this way all those righteous souls dwelling on the holy planet were kept informed of all my observations and investigations of everything concerning their strange psyches.

“From then on, certain of the righteous higher being-bodies there on the holy planet not only began to follow all my observations very attentively, but they also began to ponder on the strangeness of their psyche.

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“Then even His All-Quarters-Maintainer the Arch-cherub Helkgematios, the Governor of the holy planet, not only sanctioned the choice of these fifty blissful souls but also by His own all-gracious decision expressed a desire to help them in every way in the fulfillment of their undertaking.

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“And so, my boy, when these fifty candidates for the Sun Absolute began their investigations, then, after long and complicated researches, it became clear to them that the fundamental cause of the whole abnormality of the psyche of the three-brained beings arising on this planet was that a very definite notion arose and began to exist, that outside the essence of beings, as it were, there are two diametrically opposite factors—the sources of ‘Good’ and the sources of ‘Evil’—which are just the instigators for all their good and bad manifestations.

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¹ Toolookhterzinek is similar—of course to a certain degree—to that which on Earth is called a “radiogram.”