Beelzebubs-Tales-to-His-Grandson-by-G-I-Gurdjieff

accelerated tempo, and the process of reciprocal destruction breaks out amongtheir different communities according to established custom, then after thismaleficent property, inherent in them alone, has run its course and this processof theirs ceases for a while, the king of the community in which a greaternumber of subjects has survived, on receiving the title of 'conqueror,' usuallyseizes for himself everything belonging to the beings of the conqueredcommunity."The king-conqueror then usually commands his subjects to despoil theconquered community of all their lands, and to seize all the young beings offemale sex and all the 'riches' accumulated in the course of centuries."Well, my boy, when the subjects of that eccentric Persian king conquered thebeings of another community, he ordered them not to take or even touch anyof these, but instead to bring back as 'captives' only the learned beings of theconquered community."In order to represent clearly to yourself and understand just why thispeculiar craze, proper to him alone, arose in the individuality of that Persianking, you must know that at the period of the Tikliamishian civilization, in thetown of 'Chiklaral,' a learned three-brained being by the name ofHarnakhoom—whose essence later became crystallized into what is called an'Eternal Hasnamuss Individual'—invented the notion that any old metal youlike, found in abundance on the surface of that planet, could easily betransformed into the rare metal 'gold', and that all you needed to know for thiswas one very small secret."This pernicious invention of his became widely spread there and, havingbecome crystallized in the presence of the beings of that time, passed fromgeneration to generation and gradually took the form of a maleficent, fantasticscience under the name of 'alchemy'—the very name of that great sciencewhich had indeed existed there as a branch of genuine