B766 <=> B768 (BTG XXXIX The holy planet “Purgatory,” p. 767)

“Here, you might as well be told that your favorites also have, as it were, a similar representation about the ‘Okipkhalevnian exchange’ and they have even invented a very clever name for it, namely, ‘metempsychosis’ or ‘reincarnation’; and that branch of their famous science which in recent centuries has been created around this question also gradually became, and at the present already is, one of those minor maleficent factors, the totality of which is gradually making their Reason, already strange enough without this, always more and more, as our dear Mullah Nassr Eddin would say: ‘Shooroomooroomnian.’

“According to the fantastic branch of this theory of their ‘science,’ now called spiritualism, they suppose among other things that each of them already has a higher being-part or, as they call it, a soul, and that a transmigration must be occurring the whole time to this soul, i.e., something of the kind of this same ‘Okipkhalevnian exchange’ of which I have just spoken.

“Of course, if these unfortunates would only take into consideration that according to the second-grade cosmic law called ‘Tenikdoa’ or ‘law of gravity,’ this same being part – if in rare cases it does happen that it arises in them – instantly rises after the first Rascooarno of the being, or, as they express it, after the death of the being, from the surface of their planet; and if they understood that the explanations and proofs, given by this branch of their ‘science,’ of all sorts of phenomena which proceed as it were among them there thanks to those fantastic souls of theirs, were only the fruits of their idle fancy – then they would already realize that everything else proved by this science of theirs is also nothing else but Mullah Nassr Eddin’s ‘twaddle.’