Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson

Chapter.Page

cocaine

 

1 The Arousing of Thought

1.8

And nothing stuck, as it was quite recently made clear to me, not through any fault of mine, nor through the fault of my former respected and nonrespected teachers, but this human labor was spent in vain owing to one unexpected and quite exceptional event which occurred at the moment of my appearance on God’s Earth, and which was—as a certain occultist well known in Europe explained to me after a very minute what is called “psycho-physico-astrological” investigation—that at that moment, through the hole made in the windowpane by our crazy lame goat, there poured the vibrations of sound which arose in the neighbor’s house from an Edison phonograph, and the midwife had in her mouth a lozenge saturated with cocaine of German make, and moreover not “Ersatz,” and was sucking this lozenge to these sounds without the proper enjoyment.

 

29 The Fruits of Former Civilizations and the Blossoms of the Contemporary

29.427

“As examples of the very many particularly maleficent inventions of those German beings, let us take just those five what are called ‘chemical substances,’ now existing there under the names of (1) satkaine, (2) aniline, (3) cocaine, (4) atropine and (5) alisarine, which chemical substances are used there at the present time by the beings of all the continents and islands as our dear Mullah Nassr Eddin says: ‘Even-without-any-economizing.’

29.429-30

“As for the third of the enumerated chemical substances they invented, namely, ‘cocaine,’ that chemical substance is not only also of great assistance to Nature in more rapidly decomposing the planetary formations—in this instance, their own planetary bodies—but this chemical means has an effect on the psyche of the contemporary beings of the planet Earth surprisingly similar to that which the famous organ Kundabuffer had on the psyche of their ancestors.

29.430

“When their ancestors had that invention in themselves of the Great Angel Looisos, then, thanks to this organ, they were always exactly in the same state as the contemporary beings are when they introduce into themselves this German invention called cocaine.

29.430

“At the present time almost all the beings who become genuine representatives of contemporary civilization very meticulously and with the greatest delight and tenderness introduce into themselves this ‘blessing’ of contemporary civilization, of course, always to the glory, as our dear Mullah Nassr Eddin says, of the ‘cloven-hoofed.’