B980 <=> B982 (BTG XLII Beelzebub in America, p. 981)

“When we were seated in the hall of the restaurant and had ordered their ‘famous champagne,’ he continued as follows:

“’When you lived among us in Persia, my dear Doctor, you perhaps happened to observe the attitude existing there, very specific for us Persians, of men towards women.

“’Namely, among us in Persia, men have two definite, one can say, “organic attitudes” towards women, in accordance with which women are, for us men, even unconsciously on our part, very sharply divided into two categories.

“’The first attitude is towards the woman, the present or future mother; and the second towards the woman-female.

“’This property of the men of our Persia who have in their nature data for these two independent attitudes and for this instinctive feeling, began to be formed only recently, about two and a half centuries ago.

“’According to the explanations once given me by my “Mullah uncle,” whom those around him called behind his back “a Mullah of the old school,” it seems that, two or three centuries ago, owing to causes evidently ensuing from certain higher World-laws, men began to make war on each other everywhere on the Earth, and especially among us in Asia, more intensively than usual, and at the same time, somehow, in most of the men, the feeling of piety began very distinctly to decline and in some of them entirely disappeared.

“’And just at that period a certain form of psychic disease spread among men from which many who were infected by it ultimately either became quite insane or committed suicide.

“’Then certain wise people of various independent groups on the continent of Asia began, with the help of various persons representative of medicine of that time – which, by the way, was then very superior to contemporary medicine – very earnestly to seek the causes of that human misfortune.