B288 <=> B290 [BTG XXIII Beelzebub’s fourth sojourn, p. 289]

“Having, thanks to the information transmitted to them from generation to generation, a many-centuried practical knowledge, they already knew which types of the passive sex can correspond to which of the active sex.

“And owing to all this, the pairs matched according to their indications almost always turned out to be corresponding, and not as it proceeds there at the present time; and that is to say they are now united in conjugal pairs who nearly always do not correspond in type; in consequence of which during the continuation of the entire existence of these couples there, about half of their, as they say, ‘inner life’ is spent only on what our esteemed Mullah Nassr Eddin expresses in one of his sayings by the following words:

“’What a good husband he is, or what a good wife she is, whose whole inner world is not busy with the constant “nagging of the other half.”’

“In any case, my boy, if these Astrologers had continued to exist there, then surely, thanks to their further practicing, the existence of the beings of this unfortunate planet would by now have gradually become such that their family relations would at least have been a little like the existence of similar beings on other planets of our Great Universe.

“But all this which was beneficently established in the process of their existence they have also sent, like all their other good attainments, without even having had time to make good use of it, ‘to the gluttonous swine’ of our respected Mullah Nassr Eddin.

“And these ‘Astrologers’ of theirs, as usually happens there, also at first began gradually to ‘shrink’ and then entirely, as is said, ‘vanished.’

“After the total abolition among them of the duties of these Astrologers, other professionals in the same sphere appeared in their place, but this time from among the ‘learned beings of new formation,’ who also began to observe and study, as it were, the results issuing from various large cosmic concentrations and their influence on the existence of the beings of their planet; but as the ordinary beings around these professionals soon noticed that their ‘observations’ and ‘studies’ consisted merely in inventing names for various remote suns and planets meaning nothing to them, existing in milliards in the Universe, and in measuring, as it were, by a method known to them alone, and which constituted their professional secret, the distance between the cosmic points seen from their planets through their ‘child’s toys’ called by them ‘telescopes,’ they began to call them, as I have already told you, Astronomers.