Esoteric joke (yes, really)

Why does Hermes Trismegistus always fart when he burps, and always burp when he farts?



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An hour after posting the above, I was reading about Tristram Shandy in Chapter Three of Carlo Ginzburg's "No Island Is an Island" (pp.49-50). There, Ginzburg quotes Sterne's narrator (Yorick) as claiming: "Wit and judgment in this world never go together; inasmuch as they are two operations differing from each other as wide as east is from west. -- So, says Locke, -- so are farting and hickuping, say I". [pp.202-203 in the original].

What are the chances of that, eh?