Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson

39 The Holy Planet “Purgatory”

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“Here you should know that your contemporary favorites very often use a notion taken by them from somewhere, I do not know whether instinctively, emotionally, or automatically, and expressed by them in the following words: ‘We are the images of God.’

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“These unfortunates do not even suspect that, of everything known to most of them concerning cosmic truths, this expression of theirs is the only true one of them all.

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“And indeed, each of them is the image of God, not of that ‘God’ which they have in their bobtailed picturings, but of the real God, by which word we sometimes still call our common Megalocosmos.

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“Each of them to the smallest detail is exactly similar, but of course in miniature, to the whole of our Megalocosmos, and in each of them there are all of those separate functionings, which in our common Megalocosmos actualize the cosmic harmonious Iraniranumange or ‘exchange of substances,’ maintaining the existence of everything existing in the Megalocosmos as one whole.

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“This same expression of theirs—‘We are the images of God’—can here serve us as a very good additional illustration in explanation of how far what is called ‘perceptible logic,’ or, as it is sometimes still said, ‘Aimnophnian mentation,’ is already distorted in them.

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“Although this expression corresponding to the truth exists there among them, yet concerning the consideration of its exact sense, as in general concerning every short verbal formulation, they at best always express with their strange shortsighted mentation—even if they should wish with their whole common presence actively and sincerely to reveal their inner representation and essential understanding of this expression of theirs—something as follows:

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“‘Good… if we are “images of God”… that means… means…“God” is like us and has an appearance also like us… and that means, our “God” has the same moustache, beard, nose, as we have, and he dresses also as we do. He dresses as we do, doubtless because like us he is also very fond of modesty; it was not for nothing that he expelled Adam and Eve from Paradise, only because they lost their modesty and began to cover themselves with clothes.’

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“In certain of the beings there, particularly of recent times, their being-Aimnophnian-mentation or perceptible logic has already become such that they can very clearly see this same ‘God’ of theirs in their picturings, almost with a comb sticking out of his left vest pocket, with which he sometimes combs his famous beard.

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“Such a superpeculiar being-Aimnophnian-mentation about their ‘God’ proceeded in your favorites chiefly from the Hasnamussian manifestations of those ‘learned’ beings who, you remember, I have already told you, assembled in the city of Babylon and collectively began to invent various maleficent fictions concerning their ‘God,’ which were afterwards by chance widely spread everywhere on that ill-fated planet. And in view of the fact that that period coincided with the time when the three-brained beings there began to exist particularly ‘Selzelnualno,’ i.e., particularly ‘passively,’ in the sense of the being-efforts proper to three-centered beings, therefore these maleficent inventions were thoroughly absorbed and appropriated by the beings.

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“And afterwards, in their transmission from generation to generation by inheritance, they gradually began to be crystallized into such monstrous ‘logicnestarian-materials,’ with the result that in the psyche of the contemporary three-brained beings there, there began to proceed such an already exceptionally distorted being-Aimnophnian-mentation.

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“And the reason that they picture their ‘God’ to themselves just with a long beard was due to the fact that then, among the maleficent inventions of the Babylonian ‘learned,’ it was said among other things that that famous ‘God’ of theirs had, as it were, the appearance of a very old man, just with a heavy beard.

“But concerning the appearance of their ‘God,’ your favorites have gone still further. Namely, they picture this famous ‘God’ of theirs exactly as an ‘Old Jew,’ since in their bobtailed notions, all sacred personages originated from that race.

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“At any rate, my little Hassein, each of your favorites, separately, is, in his whole presence, exactly similar in every respect to our Megalocosmos.