Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson

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Afalkalna

 

30 Art

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“‘I personally suggest that this transmission to future generations be made through the human what are called “Afalkalna,” that is through various productions of man’s hands which have entered into use in the daily life of the people, and also through the human “Soldjinoha,” that is through various procedures and ceremonies which have already been established for centuries in the social and family life of people and which automatically pass from generation to generation.

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“‘Either these human Afalkalna themselves, and in particular those which are made of lasting materials, will survive and for various reasons will be handed down to men of distant generations, or copies of them will pass from generation to generation, thanks to the property which is rooted in the essence of man of giving out as one’s own, after having changed some minor detail, one or another of the productions of man which have reached them from long past epochs.

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“‘The question now is only this, by what means can such a transmission through the various human Afalkalna and Soldjinoha as I have described be actualized?

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“‘I personally suggest that this be done through the Universal Law called the “Law of Sevenfoldness.”

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“‘Well then, of the knowledge now existing which we have personally attained or which has reached us from times past, just that knowledge which we shall agree is useful for our remote descendants must be indicated in some way or other in the said human Afalkalna and Soldjinoha, so that in the future it may be perceived by the pure Reason of man by means of this great Universal Law.

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“The information they indicated in the said manner passed from generation to generation, only, in all, for a few of their succeeding centuries.

“Thanks to their chief particularity, namely, to the ‘periodic-process-of-reciprocal-destruction,’ there almost wholly disappeared from amongst the ordinary beings there, soon after the period of the ‘Babylonian-magnificence,’ not only the Legominism concerning the keys to the lawful inexactitudes in the Law of Sevenfoldness contained in each of the branches of the ‘being-Afalkalna’ and ‘Soldjinoha,’ but, as I have already told you, there gradually also disappeared even the very notion of the Universal Law of the holy Heptaparaparshinokh, which in Babylon they then called the Law of Sevenfoldness.

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“Now listen why I used the expression ‘almost,’ when I said that at the end of three of their centuries after the Babylonian period there ‘almost’ entirely ceased to exist every kind of conscious and automatic reproduction of the being-Afalkalna and Soldjinoha.

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“The point is that two branches of the conscious hand-productions of the beings of the Babylonian period chanced upon favorable conditions and some of them passed from generation to generation partly consciously and partly automatically on the part of the transmitting beings.

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“One of the said two branches recently ceased to exist; but the other has even reached certain beings of contemporary times almost unchanged.

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“This branch which reached beings of contemporary times is called there ‘sacred dances.’

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“And the second mentioned branch which recently ceased to exist was that branch of the knowledge of the Babylonian learned beings which they called the ‘combination-of-different-tonalities-of-color’ and which the contemporary beings now call ‘painting.’