Richard Burton's ten--volume translation of the The Arabian
Nights was followed by a 'Terminal Essay' addressing a number
of interpretative issues. Section D addressed "pederasty".
Although Burton is careful to use words like "vice"
and "inversion", this essay represents one of the earliest
modern efforts to collect and make know both cross-cultural and
historica information about "homosexuality" (a word
not used by Burton).
[Note: In this etext, Burton's footnotes, indented in italics, follow the paragraph they were in.]
The 'execrabilis familia pathicorum' first came before me by a
chance of earlier life. In 1845, when Sir Charles Napier had conquered
and annexed Sind, despite a fraction (mostly venal) which sought
favour with the now defunct 'Court of Directors to the Honourable
East India Company,' the veteran began to consider his conquest
with a curious eye. It was reported to him that Karàchi,
a townlet of some two thousand souls and distant not more than
a mile from camp, supported no less than three lupanars or bordels,
in which not women but boys and eunuchs, the former demanding
nearly a double price,[l] lay for hire. Being then the only British
officer who could speak Sindi, I was asked indirectly to make
enquiries and to report upon the subject; and I undertook the
task on express condition that my report should not be forwarded
to the Bombay Government, from whom supporters of the Conqueror's
policy could expect scant favour, mercy or justice. Accompanied
by a Munshi, Mirza Mohammed Hosayn of Shiraz, and habited as a
merchant, Mirza Abdullah the Bushiri [2] passed many an evening
in the townlet visited all the porneia and obtained the fullest
details which were duly despatched to Government House. But the
'Devil's Brother' presently quitted Sind leaving in his office
my unfortunate official: this found its way with sundry other
reports [3] to Bombay and produced the expected result. A friend
in the Secretariat informed me that my summary dismissal from
the service had been formally proposed by one of Sir Charles Napier's
successors, whose decease compels me parcere sepulto. But this
excess of outraged modesty was not allowed.
l. This detail especially excited the veteran's
curiosity. The reason proved to be that the scrotum of the unmutilated
boy could be used as a kind of bridle for directing the movements
of the animal. I find nothing of the kind mentioned in the Sotadical
literature of Greece and Rome, although the same cause might be
expected everywhere to have the same effect. But in Mirabeau (Kadhésch)
a grand seigneur moderne, when his valet-de-chambre de confiance
proposes to provide him with women instead of boys, exclaims,
'Des femmes! eh! c'est comme si tu me servais un gigot sans manche.'
See also infra for 'Le poids du tisserand.' [The notes here and
throughout this essay are Burton's.]
2. See Falconry in the
Valley of the Indus, London, John Van Voorst, 1852.
3. Submitted to Government on Dec. 31, '47 and
March 2, '48, they were printed in Selections
from the Records of the Government of India. Bombay, New Series,
No. xvii, Part 2, 1855. These are (1) Notes on the Population
of Sind, etc., and (2) Brief Notes on the Modes of Intoxication,
etc., written in collaboration with my late friend Assistant-Surgeon
John E. Stocks, whose early death was a sore loss to scientific
botany.
Subsequent enquiries in many and distant countries enabled me
to arrive at the following conclusions:
- There exists what I shall call a 'Sotadic Zone,' bounded westwards
by the northern shores of the Mediterranean (N. Lat. 43 °)
and by the southern (N. Lat. 30°). Thus the depth would be
780 to 800 miles including meridional France, the Iberian Peninsula,
Italy and Greece, with the coast-regions of Africa from Marocco
to Egypt.
- Running eastward the Sotadic Zone narrows, embracing Asia
Minor, Mesopotamia and Chaldaea, Afghanistan, Sind, the Punjab
and Kashmir.
- In Indo-China the belt begins to broaden, enfolding China,
Japan and Turkistan.
- It then embraces the South Sea Islands and the New World where,
at the time of its discovery, Sotadic love was, with some exceptions,
an established racial institution.
- Within the Sotadic Zone the Vice is popular and endemic, held
at the worst to be a mere peccadillo, whilst the races to the
North and South of the limits here defined practise it only sporadically
amid the opprobrium of their fellows who, as a rule, are physically
incapable of performing the operation and look upon it with the
liveliest disgust.
Before entering into topographical details concerning Pederasty,
which I hold to be geographical and climatic, not racial, I must
offer a few considerations of its cause and origin. We must not
forget that the love of boys has its noble sentimental side. The
Platonists and pupils of the Academy, followed by the Sufis or
Moslem Gnostics held such affection, pure as ardent, to be the
beau idéal which united in man's soul the creature with
the Creator. Professing to regard youths as the most cleanly and
beautiful objects in this phenomenal world, they declared that
by loving and extolling the chef-d'œuvre, corporeal and intellectual,
of the Demiurgus, disinterestedly and without any admixture of
carnal sensuality, they are paying the most fervent adoration
to the Causa causans. They add that such affection, passing as
it does the love of women, is far less selfish than fondness for
and admiration of the other sex which, however innocent, always
suggest sexuality; [4] and Easterns add that the devotion of the
moth to the taper is purer and more fervent than the Bulbul's
love for the Rose. Amongst the Greeks of the best ages the system
of boy-favourites was advocated on considerations of morals and
politics. The lover undertook the education of the beloved through
precept and example, while the two were conjoined by a tie stricter
than the fraternal. Hieronymus the Peripatetic strongly advocated
it because the vigorous disposition of youths and the confidence
engendered by their association often led to the overthrow of
tyrannies. Socrates declared that 'a most valiant army might be
composed of boys and their lovers; for that of all men they would
be most ashamed to desert one another.' And even Virgil, despite
the foul flavour of Formosum pastor Corydon, could write:
Nisus amore pio pueri.
The only physical cause for the practice which suggests itself
to me and that must be owned to be purely conjectural, is that
within the Sotadic Zone there is a blending of the masculine and
feminine temperaments, a crasis which elsewhere occurs only sporadically.
Hence the male féminisme whereby the man becomes patiens
as well as agens, and the woman a tribade, a votary of mascula
Sappho,[5] Queen of Frictrices or Rubbers.[6] Prof. Mantegazza
claims to have discovered the cause of this pathological love,
this perversion of the erotic sense, one of the marvellous list
of amorous vagaries which deserve, not prosecution but the pitiful
care of the physician and the study of the psychologist. According
to him the nerves of the rectum and the genitalia, in all cases
closely connected, are abnormally so in the pathic who obtains,
by intromission, the venereal orgasm which is usually sought through
the sexual organs. So amongst women there are tribads who can
procure no pleasure except by foreign objects introduced a posteriori.
Hence his threefold distribution of sodomy; (1) Periphic or anatomical,
caused by an unusual distribution of the nerves and their hyperaesthesia;
(2) Luxurious, when love a tergo is preferred on account of the
narrowness of the passage; and (3) the Psychical. But this is
evidently superficial: the question is what causes this neuropathy,
this abnormal distribution and condition of the nerves.[7]
4 Glycon the Courtesan in Athen.
xiii. 84 declares that 'boys are handsome only when they resemble
women;' and so the Leamed Lady in The Nights (vol. v, 160)
declares 'Boys are likened to girls because folks say, Yonder
boy is like a girl.' For the superior physical beauty of the human
male compared with the female, see The Nights, vol. iv.
15; and the boy's voice before it breaks excels that of any diva.
5 'Mascula,' from the priapiscus, the over-development
of clitoris (the veretrum muliebre, in Arabic Abu Tartur, habens
cristam) which enabled her to play the man. Sappho (nat. 612 B.C.)
has been retoillée like Mary Stuart, La Brinvilliers, Marie
Antoinette and a host of feminine names which have a savour not
of sanctity. Maximus of Tyre (Dissert. xxiv.) declares that the
Eros of Sappho was Socratic and that Gyrinna and Atthis were as
Alcibiades and Chermides to Socrates: Ovid, who could consult
documents now lost, takes the same view in the Letter of Sappho
to Phaon and in Tristia ii. 265
--- Lesbia quid docuit Sappho nisi amare puellas?
Suidas supports Ovid. Longinus eulogises the erotike
mania (a term applied only to carnal love) of the far-famed
Ode to Atthis
---Ille mî par esse Deo videtur . . .
---Heureux! qui près de toi pour toi seule soupire
---(Blest as th' immortal gods is he, etc )
By its love symptoms, suggesting that possession is the sole cure
for passion Erasistratus discovered the love of Antiochus for
Stratonice. Mure (Hist. of Greek Literature, 1850) speaks
of the Ode to Aphrodite (Frag. 1) as 'one in which the whole volume
of Greek literature offers the most powerful concentration into
one brilliant focus of the modes in which amatory concupiscence
can display itself.' But Bernhardy, Bode, Richter, K. O. Muller
and esp. Welcker have made Sappho a model of purity, much like
some of our dull wits who have converted Shakespeare, that most
debauched genius, into a good British bourgeois.
6 The Arabic Sahhákah, the Tractatrix of
Subigitatrix, who has been noticed in vol. iv. 134. Hence to Lesbianise
( lesbizein) and tribassare (tríbesthai)
the former applied to the love of woman for woman and the latter
to its mécanique: this is either natural, as friction of
the labia and insertion of the clitoris when unusually developed;
or artificial by means of the fascinum, the artificial penis (the
Persian 'Mayájang'); the patte de chat, the banana-fruit
and a multitude of other succedanea. As this feminine perversion
is only glanced at in The Nights I need hardly enlarge
upon the subject.
7 Plato ( Symp.) is
probably mystical when he accounts for such passions by there
being in the beginning three species of humanity, men, women and
men-women or androgynes. When the latter were destroyed by Zeus
for rebellion, the two others were individually divided into equal
parts. Hence each division seeks its other half in the same sex;
the primitive man prefers men and the primitive woman women. C'est
beau, but - is it true? The idea was probably derived from Egypt
which supplied the Hebrews with androgynic humanity and thence
it passed to extreme India, where Shiva as Ardhanarl was male
on one side and female on the other side of the body, combining
paternal and maternal qualities and functions. The first creation
of humans (Gen. i. 27) was hermaphrodite (= Hermes and Venus)
masculum et foeminam creavit eos -- male and female created He
them - on the sixth day, with the command to increase and multiply
(ibid. v. 28) while Eve the woman was created subsequently. Meanwhile,
say certain Talmudists, Adam carnally copulated with all races
of animals. See L'Anandryne in Mirabeau's Erotika Biblion,
where Antoinette Bourgnon laments the undoubling which disfigured
the work of God, producing monsters incapable of independent self-reproduction
like the vegetable kingdom.
As Prince Bismarck finds a moral difference between the male and
female races of history, so I suspect a mixed physical temperament
effected by the manifold subtle influences massed together in
the word climate. Something of the kind is necessary to explain
the fact of this pathological love extending over the greater
portion of the habitable world, without any apparent connection
of race or media, from the polished Greek to the cannibal Tupi
of the Brazil. Walt Whitman speaks of the ashen grey faces of
onanists: the faded colours, the puffy features and the unwholesome
complexion of the professed pederast with his peculiar cachectic
expression, indescribable but once seen never forgotten, stamp
the breed, and Dr G Adolph is justified in declaring 'Alle Gewohnneits-paederasten
erkennen sich einander schnell, oft mit einen Blick.' This has
nothing in common with the féminisme which betrays itself
in the pathic by womanly gait, regard and gesture: it is a something
sui generis; and the same may be said of the colour and look of
the young priest who honestly refrains from women and their substitutes.
Dr. Tardieu, in his well-known work, 'Etude Medico-légale
sur les Attentats aux Mœurs,' and Dr. Adolph note a peculiar
infundibuliform disposition of the 'After' and a smoothness and
want of folds even before any abuse has taken place, together
with special forms of the male organs in confirmed pederasts.
But these observations have been rejected by Caspar, Hoffman,
Brouardel and Dr. J H. Henry Coutagne (Notes sur la Sodomie, Lyon
1880), and lt ls a medlcal questlon Whose discussion would here
be out of place.
The origin of pederasty is lost in the night of ages; but its
historique has been carefully traced by many writers, especially
Virey,[8] Rosenbaum[9] and M. H. E. Meier.[10] The ancient Greeks
who, like the modern Germans, invented nothing but were great
improvers of what other races invented, attributed the formal
apostolate of Sotadism to Orpheus, whose stigmata were worn by
the Thracian women;
Omnemque refugerat Orpheus
Foemineam venerem; -
Ille etiam Thracum populis fuit auctor, amorem
In teneres transferre mares: citraque juventam
Aetatis breve ver, et primos carpere flores.
Ovid. Met. x. 79-85.
Euripides proposed Laïus father of Oedipus as the inaugurator,
whereas Timaeus declared that the fashion of making favourites
of boys was introduced into Greece from Crete, for Malthusian
reasons said Aristotle (Pol. ii, 10) attributing it to Minos.
Herodotus, however, knew far better, having discovered (ii. c.
80) that the Orphic and Bacchic rites were originally Egyptian.
But the Father of History was a traveller and an annalist rather
than an archaeologist and he tripped in the following passage
(i. c. 135), 'As soon as they (the Persians) hear of any luxury,
they instantly make it their own, and hence, among other matters,
they have learned from the Hellenes a passion for boys' ('unnatural
lust' says modest Rawlinson). Plutarch (De Malig. Herod. xiii.)[ll]
asserts with much more probability that the Persians used eunuch
boys according to the Mos Graeciae, long before they had seen
the Grecian main.
8 De la Femme, Paris,
1827
9 Die Lustseuche des Alterthum's,
Halle, 1839.
10 See his exhaustive article on (Grecian) 'Paederastie'
in the Allgemeine Encyclopaedie of Ersch
and Gruber, Leipzig, Brockhaus, 1837. He carefully traces it
through the several states, Dorians, Aeolians, Ionians, the Attic
cities and those of Asia Minor. For these details I must refer
my readers to M. Meier; a full account of these would fill a volume
not the section of an essay
1l Against which see Henri Estienne, Apologie
pour Hérodote, a society satire of xvith century, lately
reprinted by Liseux
In the Holy Books of the Hellenes, Homer and Hesiod, dealing with
the heroic ages, there is no trace of pederasty, although, in
a long subsequent generation, Lucian suspected Achilles and Patroclus
as he did Orestes and Pylades, Theseus and Pirithous. Homer's
praises of beauty are reserved for the feminines, especiallyhis
favourite Helen. But the Dorians of Crete seem to have commended
the abuse to Athens and Sparta and subsequently imported it into
Tarentum, Agrigentum and other colonies. Ephorus in Strabo (x.
4 § 21) gives a curious account of the violent abduction
of beloved boys (parastothentes) by the lover (erastes);
of the obligations of the ravisher (philetor) to the favourite
(kleinos) [l2] and of the 'marriage-ceremonies' which lasted
two months. See also Plato Laws i. c. 8. Servius (Ad Aeneid.
x. 325) informs us 'De Cretensibus accepimus, quod in amore puerorum
intemperantes fuerunt, quod postea in Laconas et in totam Graeciam
translatum est.' The Cretans and afterwards their apt pupils the
Chalcidians held it disreputable for a beautiful boy to lack a
lover. Hence Zeus the national Doric god of Crete loved Ganymede;[13]
Apollo, another Dorian deity, loved Hyacinth, and Hercules, a
Doric hero who grew to be a sun-god, loved Hylas and a host of
others: thus Crete sanctified the practice by the examples of
the gods and demigods. But when legislation came, the subject
had qualified itself for legal limitation and as such was undertaken
by Lycurgus and Solon, according to Xenophon (Lac. ii.
13), who draws a broad distinction between the honest love of
boys and dishonest (aïchiostos) lust. They both approved
of pure pederastia, like that of Harmodius and Aristogiton; but
forbade it with serviles because degrading to a free man. Hence
the love of boys was spoken of like that of women (Plato: Phaedrus;
Repub. vi. c. 19 and Xenophon, Synop. iv. 10) e.g.,
'There was once a boy, or rather a youth, of exceeding beauty
and he had very mariy lovers' - this is the language of Hafiz
and Sa'adi. Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were allowed to
introduce it upon the stage, for 'many men were as fond of having
boys for their favourites as women for their mistresses; and this
was a frequent fashion in many well-regulated cities of Greece.'
Poets like Alcaeus, Anacreon, Agathon and Pindar affected it and
Theognis sang of a 'beautiful boy in the flower of his youth.'
The statesmen Aristides and Themistocles quarrelled over Stesileus
of Teos; and Pisistratus loved Charmus who first built an altar
to Puerile Eros, while Charmus loved Hippias son of Pisistratus.
Demosthenes the Orator took into keeping a youth called Cnosion
greatly to the indignation of his wife. Xenophon loved Clinias
and Autolycus; Aristotle, Hermeas, Theodectes [l4] and others;
Empedocles, Pausanias; Epicurus, Pytocles; Aristippus, Eutichydes
and Zeno with his Stoics had a philosophic disregard for women,
affecting only pederastia. A man in Athenaeus (iv. c. 40) left
in his will that certain youths he had loved should fight like
gladiators at his funeral; and Charicles in Lucian abuses Callicratidas
for his love of 'sterile pleasures.' Lastly there was the notable
affair of Alcibiades and Socrates, the 'sanctus paederasta"[15]
being violemment soupçonné when under the mantle:
- non semper sine plagâ ab eo surrexit. Athanaeus (v. c.
13) declares that Plato represents Socrates as absolutely intoxicated
with his passion for Alcibiades.[l6] The ancients seem to have
held the connection impure, or Juvenal would not have written
Inter Socraticos notissima fossa cinaedos,
followed by Firmicus (vii. 14) who speaks of 'Socratici paedicones.'
It is the modern fashion to doubt the pederasty of the master
of Hellenic Sophrosyne, the 'Christian before Christianity;' but
such a world-wide term as Socratic love can hardly be explained
by the lucus-a-non-lucendo theory. We are overapt to apply our
nineteenth century prejudices and prepossessions to the morality
of the ancient Greeks who would have specimen'd such squeamishness
in Attic salt.
12 In Sparta the lover was called eispnylas
or eïopnylas and the beloved as in Thessaly aïtas
or aïtes.
13 The more I study religions the more I am convinced
that man never worshipped anything but himselfi Zeus, who became
Jupiter, was an ancient king, according to the Cretans, who were
entitled liars because they showed his burial-place. From a deified
ancestor he would become a local god, like the Hebrew Jehovah
as opposed to Chemosh of Moab; the name would gain amplitude by
long time and distant travel and the old island chieftain would
end in becoming the Demiurgus. Ganymede (who possibly gave rise
to the old Lat. 'Catamitus') was probably some fair Phrygian boy
('son of Tros') who in process of time became a symbol of the
wise man seized by the eagle (perspicacity) to be raised amongst
the Immortals; and the chaste myth simply signified that only
the prudent are loved by the gods. But it rotted with age as do
all things human. For the Pederastia of the Gods see Bayle under
Chrysippe.
14 See Dissertation sur
les idées morales des Grecs et sur les danger de lire Platon.
Par M. Audé, Bibliophile, Rouen, Lemonnyer, 1879. This
is the pseudonym of the late Octave Delepierre, who published
with Gay, but not the Editio Princeps - which, if I remember rightly,
contains much more matter.
15 The phrase of J. Matthias Gesner, Comm.
Reg. Soc. Gottingen i. 1-32. It was founded upon Erasmus' 'Sancte
Socrate, ora pro nobis,' and the article was translated by M.
Alcide Bonmaire, Paris, Liseux, 1877.
16 The subject has employed many a pen, e.g. Alcibiade
Fanciullo a Scola, D. P. A. (supposed to be Pietro Aretino
- ad captandum?), Oranges, par Juann VVart, 1652: small square
8vo. of pp. 102, including 3 preliminary pp. and at end an unpaged
leaf with 4 sonnets, almost Venetian, by V. M. There is a re-impression
of the same date, a small 12mo. of longer format, pp. 124 with
pp. 2 for sonnets: in 1862 the Imprimerie Raçon printed
102 copies in 8vo. of pp. iv.-108, and in 1863 it was condemned
by the police as a liber spurcissimus atque execrandus de criminis
sodomici laude et arte. This work produced Alcibiade Enfant
à l'école, traduit pour la première fois
de l'Italien de Ferrante Pallavicini, Amsterdam, chez l'Ancien
Pierre Marteau, mdccclxvi. Pallavicini (nat. 1618), who wrote
against Rome, was beheaded, aet. 26(March 5, 1644) at Avignon
in 1644 by the vengeance of the Barberini: he was a bel esprit
déréglé, nourri d'études antiques
and a Memb. of the Acad. Degl' Incogniti. His peculiarities are
shown by his Opere Scelte, 2 vols. 12mo, Villafranca, mdclxiii.;
these do not include Alcibiade Fanciullo, a dialogue between
Philotimus and Alcibiades which seems to be a mere skit at the
Jesuits and their Péché philosophique. Then came
the Dissertation sur l'Alcibiade fanciullo a scola traduit
de l'Italien de Giambattista Baseggio et accompagnée de
notes et d'une post-face par un bibliophile français (M.
Gustave Brunet, Librarian of Bordeaux), Paris. J. Gay, 1861 -
an octavo of pp. 78 (paged), 254 copies. The same Baseggio printed
in 1850 his Disquisizioni (23 copies) and claims for F.
Pallavicini the authorship of Alcibiades which the Manuel
du Libraire wrongly attributes to M. Girol. Adda in 1859. I have
heard of but not seen the Amator fornaceaus, amator ineptus
(Palladi, 1633) supposed by some to be the origin of Alcibiade
Fanciullo: but most critics consider ita poor and insipid prodcution.
The Spartans, according to Agnon the Academic (confirmed by Plato,
Plutarch and Cicero), treated boys and girls in the same way before
marriage: hence Juvenal (xi. 173) uses 'Lacedaemonius' for a pathic
and other writers apply it to a tribade. After the Peloponnesian
War, which ended in 404 B.C., the use became merged in the abuse.
Yet some purity must have survived, even amongst the Boeotians
who produced the famous Narcissus,[17] described by Ovid (Met.
iii. 339):
Multi illum juvenes, multae cupiere puellae;
Nulli illum juvenes, nullae tetigere puellae:[l8]
for Epaminondas, whose name is mentioned with three beloveds,
established the Holy Regiment composed of mutual lovers, testifying
the majesty of Eros and preferring to a discreditable life a glorious
death. Philip's reflections on the fatal field of Chaeroneia form
their fittest epitaph. At last the Athenians, according to Aeschines,
officially punished Sodomy with death; but the threat did not
abolish bordels of boys, like those of Karachi; the Porneia and
Pornoboskeia, where slaves and pueri venales 'stood,' as the term
was, near the Pnyx, the city walls and a certain tower, also about
Lycabettus (Aesch. contra Tim.); and paid a fixed tax to the state.
The pleasures of society in civilized Greece seem to have been
sought chiefly in the heresies of love - Hetairesis [19] and Sotadism.
17 The word is from narke,
numbness, torpor, narcotism: the flowers, being loved by the infernal
gods, were offered to the Furies. Narcissus and Hippolytus are
often assumed as types of morosa voluptas, masturbation and clitorisation
for nymphomania: certain mediaeval writers found in the former
a type of the Saviour; and Mirabeau a representation of the androgynous
or first Adam: to me Narcissus suggests the Hindu Vishnu absorbed
in the contemplation of his own perfections.
18 The verse of Ovid is parallel'd by the song
of Al-Zahir al-Jazari ( Ibn Khall. iii.
720).
Illum impuberem amaverunt mares; puberem feminae.
Gloria Deo! nunquam amatoribus carebit.
19 The venerable society of prostitutes contained
three chief classes. The first and lowest were the Dicteriads,
so called from Diete (Crete) who imitated Pasiphaë, wife
of Minos, in preferring a bull to a husband; above them was the
middle class, the Aleutridae who were the Almahs or professional
musicians and the aristocracy was represented by the Hetairai,
whose wit and learning enabled them to adorn more than one page
of Grecian history. The grave Solon, who had studied in Egypt,
established a vast Dicterion (Philemon in his Delphica), or bordel,
whose proceeds swelled the revenue of the Republic.
It is calculated that the French of the sixteenth century had
four hundred names for the parts genital and three hundred for
their use in coition. The Greek vocabulary is not less copious
and some of its pederastic terms, of which Meier gives nearly
a hundred, and its nomenclature of pathologic love are curious
and picturesque enough to merit auotation.
- To live the life of Abron (the Argive) i.e. that of a paschon,
pathic or passive lover.
- The Agathonian song.
- Aischrourgia = dishonest love, also called Akolasia, Akrasia,
Arrenokoitia, etc.
- Alcinoan youths, or 'non-conformists,'
- In cute curandâ plus aequo operata Juventus.
- Alegomenos, the 'unspeakable,' as the pederast was termed
by the Council of Ancyra: also the Agrios, Apolaustus and Akolastos.
- Androgyne, of whom Ansonius wrote (Epig. lxviii. 15):
- Ecce ego sum factus femina de puero.
- Badas and badizein = clunes torquens: also Batalos = a catamite.
- Catapygos, Katapygosyne = puerarius and catadactylium from
Dactylion, the ring, used in the sense of Nerissa's, but applied
to the corollarium puerile.
- Cinaedus (Kinaidos), the active lover (poion) derived
either from his kinetics or quasi kun aidos = dog-modest.
Also Spatalocinaedus (lasciviâ fluens) = a fair Ganymede.
- Chalcidissare (Khalkidizein), from Chalcis in Euboea, a city
famed for love a posteriori; mostly applied to le léchement
des testicules by children.
- Clazomenae = the buttocks, also a sotadic disease, so called
from the Ionian city devoted to Aversa Venus; also used of a pathic,-et tergo femina pube vir est.
- Embasicoetas, prop. a link-boy at marriages, also a 'night-cap'
drunk before bed and lastly an effeminate; one who perambulavit
omnium cubilia (Catullus). See Encolpius' pun upon the Embasicete
in Satyricon, cap. iv.
- Epipedesis, the carnal assault.
- Geiton lit. 'neighbour' the beloved of Encolpius, which has
produced the Fr. Giton = Bardache, Ital. bardascia from the Arab.
Baradaj, a captive, a slave; the augm. form is Polygeiton.
- Hippias (tyranny of) when the patient (woman or boy) mounts
the agent. Aristoph. Vesp. 502. So also Kelitizein = peccare superne
or equum agitare supernum of Horace.
- Mokhtheria, depravity with boys.
- Paidika, whence paedicare (act) and paedicari (pass): so in
the Latin poet:
PEnelopes primam DIdonis prima sequatur,
Et primam CAni, syllaba prima REmi.
- Pathikos, Pathicus, a passive, like Malakos (malacus, mollis,
facilis), Malchio, Trimalchio (Petronius), Malta, Maltha and in
Hor. (Sat. ii. 25)
- Malthinus tunicis demissis ambulat.
- Praxis = the malpractice.
- pygisma = buttockry, because most actives end within the nates,
being too much excited for further intromission.
- Phœnicissare (phoinikizein) = cunnilingere in
tempore menstruum, quia hoc vitium in Phoenicia generata solebat
(Thes. Erot. Ling. Latinae); also irrumer en miel.
- Phicidissare, denotat actum per canes commissum quando lambunt
cunnos vel testiculos (Suetonius): also applied to pollution of
childhood.
- Samorium flores (Erasmus, Prov. xxiii.) alluding to the androgynic
prostitutions of Samos.
- Siphniassare (siphniazein), from Siphnos, hod. Sifanto
Island) = digito podicem fodere ad pruriginem restinguendam, says
Erasmus (see Mirabeau's Erotika Biblion, Anoscopie).
- Thrypsis = the rubbing.
Pederastia had in Greece, I have shown, its noble and ideal side:
Rome, however, borrowed her malpractices, like her religion and
polity, from those ultra-material Etruscans and debauched with
a brazen face. Even under the Republic Plautus (Casin.
ii. 21) makes one of his characters exclaim, in the utmost sang-froid,
'Ultro te, amator, apage te a dorso meo!' With increased luxury
the evil grew and Livy notices (xxxix. 13), at the Bacchanalia,
plura virorum inter sese quam foeminarum stupra. There were individual
protests; for instance, S. Q. Fabius Maximus Servilianus (Consul
U.C. 612) punished his son for dubia castitas; and a private soldier,
C. Plotius, killed his military Tribune, Q. Luscius, for unchaste
proposals. The Lex Scantinia (Scatinia?), popularly derived from
Scantinius the Tribune and of doubtful date (226 b.c.?), attempted
to abate the scandal by fine and the Lex Julia by death; but they
were trifling obstacles to the flood of infamy which surged in
with the Empire. No class seems then to have disdained these 'sterile
pleasures:' l'on n'attachoit point alors à cette espèce
d'amour une note d'infamie, comme en pais de chrétienté,
says Bayle under 'Anacreon.' The great Caesar, the Cinaedus calvus
of Catullus, was the husband of all the wives and the wife of
all the husbands in Rome (Suetonius, cap. lii.); and his soldiers
sang in his praise "Gallias Caesar subegit, Nicomedes Caesarem"
(Suet. cies. xlix.); whence his sobriquet 'Fornix Bithynicus.'
Of Augustus the people chanted
Videsne ut Cinaedus orbem digito temperet?
Tiberius, with his pisciculi and greges exoletorum, invented the
Symplegma or nexus of Sellarii, agentes et patientes, in which
the spinthriae (lit. women's bracelets) were connected in a chain
by the bond of flesh [20] Seneca (Quaest. Nat.): Of this refinement,
which in the earlier part of the nineteenth century was renewed
by sundry Englishmen at Naples, Ausonius wrote (Epig. cxix.
1),
Tres uno in lecto: stuprum duo perpetiuntur;
And Martial had said (xii. 43)
Quo symplegmate quinque cupulentur;
Qua plures teneantur a catena; etc.
Ausonius recounts of Caligula he so lost patience that he forcibly
entered the priest M. Lepidus, before the sacrifice was completed.
The beautiful Nero was formally married to Pythagoras (or Doryphoros)
and afterwards took to wife Sporus who was first subjected to
castration of a peculiar fashion; he was then named Sabina after
the deceased spouse and claimed queenly honours. The 'Othonis
et Trajani pathici' were famed; the great Hadrian openly loved
Antinous and the wild debaucheries of Heliogabalus seem only to
have amused, instead of disgusting, the Romans.
20 This and Saint Paul (Romans i. 27) suggested
to Caravaggio his picture of St Rosario (in the museum of the
Grand Duke of Tuscany), showing a circle of thlrty men turpiter
ligati.
Uranopolis allowed public lupanaria where adults and meritorii
pueri, who began their career as early as seven years, stood for
hire: the inmates of these cauponæ wore sleeved tunics and
dalmatics like women. As in modern Egypt pathic boys, we learn
from Catullus, haunted the public baths. Debauchees had signals
like freemasons whereby they recognized one another. The Greek
Skematizein was made by closing the hand to represent the scrotum
and raising the middle finger as if to feel whether a hen had
eggs, tâter si les poulettes ont l'œuf: hence the Athenians
called it Catapygon or sodomite and the Romans digitus impudicus
or infamis, the 'medical finger [2l]' of Rabelais and the Chiromantists.
Another sign was to scratch the head with the minimus - digitulo
caput scabere (Juv. ix. 133).[22] The prostitution of boys was
first forbidden by Domitian; but Saint Paul, a Greek, had formally
expressed his abomination of Le Vice (Rom. i. 26; i. Cor. vi.
8); and we may agree with Grotius (de Verit. ii. c. 13) that early
Christianity did much to suppress it. At last the Emperor Theodosius
punished it with fire as a profanation, because sacro-sanctum
esse debetur hospitium virilis animae.
21 Properly speaking 'Medicus' is the third or
ring-finger, as shown by t e o d Chiromantlst verses:
Est pollex Veneris; sed Jupiter indice gaudet
Saturnus medium; Sol medicumque tenet.
22 So Seneca uses digito scalpit caput. The modern
Italian does the same by inserting the thumb-tip between the index
and medius to suggest the clitoris.
In the pagan days of imperial Rome her literature makes no difference
between boy and girl. Horace naïvely says (Sat. ii. 118):
Ancilla aut verna est praesto puer;
and with Hamlet, but in a dishonest sense:
- Man delights me not
Nor woman neither.
Similarly the Spaniard Martial, who is a mine of such pederastic
allusions (xi. 46):
Sive puer arrisit, sive puella tibi.
That marvellous Satyricon which unites the wit of Molière[23]
with the debaucheries of Piron, whilst the writer has been described,
like Rabelais, as purissimus in impuritate, is a kind of Triumph
of Pederasty. Geiton the hero, a handsome curly-pated hobbledehoy
of seventeen, with his câlinerie and wheedling tongue, is
courted like one of the sequor sexus: his lovers are inordinately
jealous of him and his desertion leaves deep scars upon the heart.
But no dialogue between man and wife in extremis could be more
pathetic than that in the scene where shipwreck is imminent. Elsewhere
everyone seems to attempt his neighbour: a man alte succinctus
assails Ascyltos; Lycus, the Tarentine skipper, would force Encolpius
and so forth: yet we have the neat and finished touch (cap. vii.):
- 'The lamentation was very fine (the dying man having manumitted
his slaves) albeit his wife wept not as though she loved him.
How were it had he not behaved to her so well?'
23 What can be wittier than the now trite 'Tale
of the Ephesian Matron', whose dry humour is worthy of The
Nights? No wonder that it has made the grand tour of the world.
It is found in the neo-Phaedrus, the tales of Musaeus and in the
Septem Sapientes as the 'Widow which was comforted'. As the 'Fabliau
de la Femme qui se fist putain sur la fosse de son Mari,' it tempted
Brantôme and La Fontaine; and Abel Rémusat shows
in his Contes Chinois that it is well known to the Middle Kingdom.
Mr. Walter K. Kelly remarks that the most singular place for such
a tale is the Rule and Exercise of Holy Dying by Jeremy
Taylor, who introduces it into his chapt. v - 'Of the Contingencies
of Death and Treating our Dead.' But in those days divines were
not mealy-mouthed.
Erotic Latin glossaries [24] give some ninety words connected
with Pederasty and some, which 'speak with Roman simplicity,'
are peculiarly expressive. 'Aversa Venus' alludes to women being
treated as boys: hence Martial, translated by Piron, addresses
Mistress Martial (x. 44):
Teque puta, cunnos, uxor, habere duos.
The capillatus or comatus is also called calamistratus, the darling
curled with crisping-irons; and he is an Effeminatus i.e. qui
muliebria patitur; or a Delicatus, slave or eunuch for the use
of the Draucus, Puerarius (boy-lover) or Dominus (Mart. xi. 71).
The Divisor is so called from his practice Hillas dividere or
caedere, something like Martial's cacare mentulam or Juvenal's
Hesternae occurrere caenae. Facere vicibus (Juv. vii. 238), incestare
se invicem or mutuum facere (Plaut. Trin. ii. 437), is described
as 'a puerile vice,' in which the two take turns to be active
and passive: they are also called Gemelli and Fratres = compares
in paedicatione. Illicita libido is = praepostera seu postica
Venus, and is expressed by the picturesque phrase indicare (seu
incurvare) aliquem. Depilatus, divellere pilos, glaber, laevis
and nates pervellere are allusions to the Sotadic toilette. The
fine distinction between demittere and dejicere caput are worthy
of a glossary, while Pathica puella, puera, putus, pullipremo,
pusio, pygiaca sacra, quadrupes, scarabaeus and smerdalius explain
themselves.
24 Glossarium eroticum
linguae Latinae, sive theogoniae, legum et morum nuptialium apud
Romanos explanatio nova, auctore P. P. (Parisiis, Dondey-Dupré,
1826, in 8vo). P. P. is supposed to be Chevalier Pierre Pierrugues,
an engineer who made a plan of Bordeaux and who annotated the
Erotica Biblion. Gay writes, 'On s'est servi pour cet ouvrage
des travaux inédits de M. Ie Baron de Schonen, etc. Quant
au Chevalier Pierre Pierrugues, qu'on désignait comme l'auteur
de ce savant volume, son existence n'est pas bien avérée,
et quelques bibliographes persistent à penser que ce nom
cache la collaboration du Baron de Schonen et d'Éloi Johanneau.'
Other glossicists as Blondeau and Forberg have been printed by
Liseux, Paris.
From Rome the practice extended far and wide to her colonies especially
the Provincia now called Provence. Athenaeus (xii. 26) charges
the people of Massilia with 'acting like women out of luxury';
and he cites the saying 'May you sail to Massilia!' as if it were
another Corinth. Indeed the whole Keltic race is charged with
Le Vice by Aristotle (Pol. ii. 66), Strabo. (iv. 199) and Diodorus
Siculus (v. 32). Roman civilization carried pederasty also to
Northern Africa, where it took firm root, while the negro and
negroid races to the South ignore the erotic perversion, except
where imported by foreigners into such kingdoms as Bornu and Haussa.
In old Mauritania, now Morocco,[25] the Moors proper are notable
sodomites; Moslems, even of saintly houses, are permitted openly
to keep catamites, nor do their disciples think worse of their
sanctity for such license: in one case the English wife failed
to banish from the home 'that horrid boy'.
25 This magnificent country which the petty jealousies
of Europe condemn, like the glorious regions about Constantinople,
to mere barbarism, is tenanted by three Moslem races. The Berbers,
who call themselves Tamazight (plur. of Amazigh), are the Gaetulian
indigenes speaking an Africo-Semitic tongue (see Essai de Grammaire
Kabyle, etc. par A. Hanoteau, Paris Benjarnin Duprat). The Arabs,
descended from the conquerors in our eighth century, are mostly
nomads and camel-breeders. Third and last are the Moors proper,
the race dwelling in towns, a mixed breed originally Arabian but
modified by SiX centuries of Spanish residence and showing by
thickness of feature and a parchment-coloured skin, resembling
the American Octaroon's a negro innervation of old date. The latter
are well described in Morocco and the Moors, etc. (Sampson Low
and Co., 1876), by my late friend Dr. Arthur Leared, whose work
I should like to see reprinted.
Yet pederasty is torbidden by the Koran. In chapter iv. 20 we
read; 'And if two (men) among you commit the crime, then punish
them both,' the penalty being some hurt or damage by public reproach,
insult or scourging. There are four distinct references to Lot
and the Sodomites in chapters vii. 78; xi 77-84; xxvi. 160-174
and xxix. 28-35. In the first the prophet commissioned to the
people says, 'Proceed ye to a fulsome act wherein no creature
hath foregone ye? Verily ye come to men in lieu of women lustfully.'
We have then an account of the rain which made an end of the wicked
and this judgement on the Cities of the Plain is repeated with
more detail in the second reference. Here the angels, generally
supposed to be three, Gabriel, Michael and Raphael, appeared to
Lot as beautiful youths, a sore temptation to the sinners and
the godly man's arm was straitened concerning his visitors because
he felt unable to protect them from the erotic vagaries of his
fellow townsmen. He therefore shut his doors and from behind them
argued the matter: presently the riotous assembly attempted to
climb the wall when Gabriel, seeing the distress of his host,
smote them on the face with one of his wings and blinded them
so that all moved off crying for aid and saying that Lot had magicians
in his house. Hereupon the 'cities' which, if they ever existed,
must have been Fellah villages, were uplifted: Gabriel thrust
his wing under them and raised them so high that the inhabitants
of the lower heaven (the lunar sphere) could hear the dogs barking
and the cocks crowing. Then came the rain of stones: these were
clay pellets baked in hell-fire, streaked white and red, or having
some mark to distinguish them from the ordinary and each bearing
the name of its destination like the missiles which destroyed
the host of Abrahat al-Ashram. [26] Lastly the 'Cities' were turned
upside down and cast upon earth. These circumstantial unfacts
are repeated at full length in the other two chapters; but rather
as an instance of Allah's power than as a warning against pederasty,
which Mohammed seems to have regarded with philosophic indifference.
The general opinion of his followers is that it should be punished
like fornication unless the offenders made a public act of penitence.
But here, as in adultery, the law is somewhat too clement and
will not convict unless four credible witnesses swear to have
seen rem in re. I have noticed (vol. i. 211) the vicious opinion
that the Ghilman or Wuldan, the beautiful boys of Paradise, the
counterparts of the Houris, will be lawful catamites to the True
Believers in a future state of happiness: the idea is nowhere
countenanced in Al-Islam; and, although I have often heard debauchees
refer to it, the learned look upon the assertion as scandalous.
26 Thus somewhat agreeing with one of the multitudinous
modern theories that the Pentapolis was destroyed by discharges
of meteoric stones during a tremendoues thunderstorm. Possible,.
but where are the stones?
As in Morocco so the Vice prevails throughout the old regencies
of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli and all the cities of the South
Mediterranean seaboard, whilst it is unknown to the Nubians, the
Berbers and the wilder tribes dwelling inland. Proceeding Eastward
we reach Egypt, that classical region of all abominations which,
marvellous to relate, flourished in closest contact with men leading
the purest of lives, models of moderation and morality, of religion
and virtue. Amongst the ancient Copts Le Vice was part and portion
of the Ritual and was represented by two male partridges alternately
copulating (Interp. in Priapi Carm. xvii). The evil would have
gained strength by the invasion of Cambyses (524 B.C.), whose
armies, after the victory over Psammenitus, settled in the Nile-Valley,
and held it, despite sundry revolts, for some hundred and ninety
years. During these six generations the Iranians left their mark
upon Lower Egypt and especially, as the late Rogers Bey proved,
upon the Fayyum the most ancient Delta of the Nile. [27] Nor would
the evil be diminished by the Hellenes who, under Alexander the
Great, 'liberator and saviour of Egypt' (332 B.C.), extinguished
the native dynasties: the love of the Macedonian for Bagoas the
Eunuch being a matter of history. From that time and under the
rule of the Ptolemies the morality gradually decayed; the Canopic
orgies extended into private life and the debauchery of the men
was equalled only by the depravity of the women. Neither Christianity
nor Al-Islam could effect a change for the better; and social
morality seems to have been at its worst during the past century
when Sonnini travelled (A.D. 1717). The French officer, who is
thoroughly trustworthy, draws the darkest picture of the widely-spread
criminality especially of the bestiality and the sodomy (chapt.
xv.) which formed the 'delight of the Egyptians.' During the Napoleonic
conquest Jaubert in his letter to General Bruix (p. 19) says,
'Les Arabes et les Mamelouks ont traité quelques-uns de
nos prisonniers comme Socrate traitait, dit-on, Alcibiade. Il
fallait périr ou y passer.' Old Anglo-Egyptians still chuckle
over the tale of Sa'id Pasha and M. de Ruyssenaer, the highdried
and highly respectable Consul-General for the Netherlands, who
was solemnly advised to make the experiment, active and passive,
before offering his opinion upon the subject. In the present age
extensive intercourse with Europeans has produced not a reformation
but a certain reticence amongst the upper classes: they are as
vicious as ever, but they do not care for displaying their vices
to the eyes of mocking strangers.
27 To this Iranian domination I attribute the
use of many Persic words which are not yet obsolete in Eygpt.
'Bakhshish,' for instance, is not intelligible in the Moslem regions
west of the Nile-Valley and for a present the Moors say Hadiyah,
regalo or favor.
Syria and Palestine, another ancient focus of abomlnations, borrowed
from Egypt and exaggerated the worship of Androgynic and hermaphroditic
deities. Plutarch (De Iside) notes that the old Nilotes held the
moon to be of 'male-female sex,' the men sacrificing to Luna and
the women to Lunus. [28] Isis also was a hermaphrodite, the idea
being that Aether or Air (the lower heavens) was the menstruum
of generative nature; and Damascius explained the tenet by the
all-fruitful and prolific powers of the atmosphere. Hence the
fragment attributed to Orpheus, the song of Jupiter (Air) -
All things from Jove descend
Jove was a male,
Jove was a deathless bride;
For men call Air, of two-fold sex, the Jove.
Julius Firmicus relates that 'The Assyrians and part of the Africans'
(along the Mediterranean seaboard?) 'hold Air to be the chief
element and adore its fanciful figure (imaginata figura), consecrated
under the name of Juno or the Virgin Venus.... Their companies
of priests cannot duly serve her unless they effeminate their
faces, smooth their skins and disgrace their masculine sex by
feminine ornaments. You may see men in their very temples amid
general groans enduring miserable dalliance and becoming passives
like women (viros muliebria pati) and they expose, with boasting
and ostentation, the pollution of the impure and immodest body.'
Here we find the religious significance of eunuchry. It was practised
as a religious rite by the Tympanotribas or Gallus,[29] the castrated
votary of Rhea or Bona Mater, in Phrygia called Cybele, self-mutilated
but not in memory of Atys; and by a host of other creeds: even
Christianity, as sundry texts show,[30] could not altogether cast
out the old possession. Hence too we have an explanation of sotadic
love in its second stage, when it became, like cannibalism, a
matter of superstition. Assuming a nature-implanted tendency,
we see that like human sacrlfice it was held to be the most acceptable
offering to the God-goddess in the Orgia or sacred ceremonies,
a something set apart for peculiar worship. Hence in Rome as in
Egypt the temples of Isis (Inachidos llmina, Isiacae sacraria
Lunae) were centres of sodomy and the rellgious practice was adopted
by the grand priestly castes from Mesopotamia to Mexico and Peru.
28 Arnobius and Tertullian, with the arrogance
of their caste and its miserable ignorance of that symbolism which
often concealed from vulgar eyes the most precious mysteries,
used to taunt the heathen for praying to deities whose sex they
ignored: 'Consuistis in precibus "Seu tu Deus seu tu Dea,"
dicere!' These men would know everything- they made God the merest
work of man's brains and armed him with a despotism of omnipotence
which rendered their creation truly dreadful.
29 Gallus lit.=a cock, in pornologic parlance
is a capon, a castrato.
30 The texts justifying or conjoining castration
are Matt. xviii. 8-9 Mark ix. 43-47, Luke xxiii. 29 and Col. iii.
5. St. Paul preached (I Corin. vii. 29) that a man should live
with his wife as if he had none. The Abelian heretics of Africa
abstained from women because Abel died virginal. Origen mutilated
himself after interpreting too rigorously Matth. xix. 12, and
was duly excommunicated But his disciple, the Arab Valerius founded
(A.D. 250) the castrated sect called Valerians who, persecuted
and dispersed by the Emperors Constantine and Justinian, became
the spiritual fathers of the modern Skopzis. These eunuchs first
appeared in Russia at the end of the xith century, when two Greeks,
John and Jephrem, were metropolitans of Kiew: the former was brought
thither in 1089 A.D. by Princess Anna Wassewolodowna and is called
by the chronicles Nawjè or the Corpse. But in the early
part of the last century (1715-33) a sect arose in the circle
of Uglitseh and in Moscow, at first called Clisti or flagellants
which developed into the modern Skopzi. For this extensive subject
see De Stein (Zeitschrift für Ethn. Berlin, 1875) and Mantegazza,
chapt. Vi.
We find the earliest written notices of the Vice in the mythical
destruction of the Pentapolis (Gen. xix.), Sodom, Gomorrah ( =
'Amirah, the cultivated country), Adama, Zeboïm and Zoar
or Bela. The legend has been amply embroidered by the Rabbis who
make the Sodomites do everything à l'envers: e.g. if a
man were wounded he was fined for bloodshed and was compelled
to fee the offender; and if one cut off the ear of a neighbour's
ass he was condemned to keep the animal till the ear grew again.
The Jewish doctors declare the people to have been a race of sharpers
with rogues for magistrates, and thus they justify the Judgement
which they read literally. But the traveller cannot accept it.
I have carefully examined the lands at the North and at the South
of that most beautiful lake, the so-called Dead Sea, whose tranquil
loveliness, backed by the grand plateau of Moab, is an object
of admiration to all save patients suffering from the strange
disease 'Holy Land on the Brain.[3l] But I found no traces of
craters in the neighbourhood, no signs of vulcanism, no remains
of 'meteoric stones': the asphalt which named the water is a mineralized
vegetable washed out of the limestones, and the sulphur and salt
are brought down by the Jordan into a lake without issue. I must
therefore look upon the history as a myth which may have served
a double purpose. The first would be to deter the Jew from the
Malthusian practices of his pagan predecessors, upon whom obloquy
was thus cast, so far resembling the scandalous and absurd legend
which explained the names of the children of Lot by Pheiné
and Thamma as Moab' (Mu-ab) the water or semen of the father,
and 'Ammon' as mother's son, that is, bastard. The fable would
also account for the abnormal fissure containing the lower Jordan
and the Dead Sea, which the late Sir R. I. Murchison used wrong-headedly
to call a Volcano of Depression': this geological feature, that
cuts off the river-basin from its natural outlet the Gulf of Eloth
(Akabah), must date from myriads of years before there were 'Cities
of the Plains.' But the main object of the ancient lawgiver, Osarsiph,
Moses or the Moseidae, was doubtless to discountenance a perversion
prejudicial to the increase of population. And he speaks wlth
no uncertaln voice, whooso lieth with a beast shall surely be
put to death (Exod. xxii. 19): If a man lie with mankind as he
lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination:
they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them
(Levit. xx. 13; where vv 15-16 threaten with death man and woman
who lie with beasts). Again, There shall be no whore of the daughters
of Israel nor a sodomite of the sons of Israel (Deut. xxii. 5).
31 See the marvellously absurd description of
the glorious 'Dead Sea' in the Purchas v 84.
The old commentators on the Sodom-myth are most unsatisfactory
e.g. Parkhurst, s.v. Kadesh. 'From hence we may observe the peculiar
propriety of this punishment of Sodom and of the neighbouring
cities. By their sodomitical impurities they meant to acknowledge
the Heavens as the cause of fruitfulness independently upon, and
in opposition to Jehovah;[32] therefore Jehovah, by raining upon
them not genial showers but brimstone from heaven, not only destroyed
the inhabitants, but also changed all that country, which was
before as the garden of God, into brimstone and salt that is not
sown nor beareth, neither any grass groweth therein.' It must
be owned that to this Pentapolis was dealt very hard measure for
religiously and diligently practising a popular rite which a host
of cities even in the present day, as Naples and Shiraz, to mention
no others, affect for simple luxury and affect with impunity.
The myth may probably reduce itself to very small proportions,
a few Fellah villages destroyed by a storm, like that which drove
Brennus from Delphi.
32 Jehovah here is made to play an evil part by
destroying men instead of teaching them better. But, 'Nous faisons
les Dieux à notre image et nous portons dans le ciel ce
que nous voyons sur la terre.' The idea of Yahweh, or Yah is palpably
Egyptian, the Ankh or ever-living One: the etymon, however, was
learned at Babylon and is still found amongst the cuneiforms.
The Hebrews entering Syria found it religionized by Assyria and
Babylonia, whence Accadian Ishtar had passed west and had become
Ashtoreth, Ashtaroth or Ashirah,[33] the Anaitis of Armenia, the
Phoenician Astarte and the Greek Aphrodite, the great Moon-goddess,[34]
who is queen of Heaven and Love. In another phase she was Venus
Mylitta = the Procreatrix, in thaldaic Mauludata and in Arabic
Moawallidah, she who bringeth forth. She was worshipped by men
habited as women and vice versâ; for which reason in the
Torah (Deut. xx. 5) the sexes are forbidden to change dress. The
male prostitutes were called Kadesh the holy, the women being
Kadeshahs, and doubtless gave themselves up to great excesses.
Eusebius (De bit. Const. iii. c. 55) describes a school of impurity
at Aphac, where women and 'men whû were not men' practised
all manner of abominations in honour of the Demon (Venus). Here
the Phrygian symbolism of Kybele and Attis (Atys) had become the
Syrian Ba'al Tammuz and Astarte, and the Grecian Dionaea and Adonis,
the anthropomorphic forms of the two greater lights. The site,
Apheca, now Wady al-Afik on the route from Bayrut to the Cedars,
is a glen of wild and wondrous beauty, fitting frame-work for
the loves of goddess and demigod: and the ruins of the temple
destroyed by Constantine contrast with Nature's work, the glorious
fountain, splendidior vitro, which feeds the River Ibrahim and
still at times Adonis runs purple to the sea. [35]
33 The name still survives in the Shajarat al-Ashara,
a clump of trees near the village Al-Ghajar (of the Gypsies?)
at the foot of Hermon.
34 I am not quite sure that Astarte is not primarily
the planet Venus; but I can hardly doubt that Prof. Max Muller
and Sir G. Cox are mistaken in bringing from India Aphrodite the
Dawn and her attendants, the Charites identified with the Vedic
Harits. Of Ishtar in Accadia, however, Roscher seems to have proved
that she is distinctly the Moon sinking into Amenti (the west,
the Underworld) in search of her lost spouse Izdubar, the Sun-god.
This again is pure Egyptianism.
35 In this classical land of Venus the worship
of Ishtar-Ashtaroth is by no means obsolete. The Metawali heretics,
a people of Persian descent and Shilte tenets, and the peasantry
of 'Bilad B'sharrah,' which I would derive from Bayt Ashlrah,
stlll pilgrlmage to the ruins and address their vows to the Sayyidat
al-Kabirah, the Great Lady. Orthodox Moslems accuse them of abommable
orgies and point to the lamps and rags which they suspend to a
tree entitled Shajarat al-Sitt - the Lady's tree - an Acacia Albida
which, according to some travellers, is found only here and at
Sayda (Sidon) where an avenue exists. The people of Kasrawan,
a Christian province in the Libanus, inhabited by a peculiarly
prurient race, also hold high festival under the farfamed Cedars
and their women sacrifice to Venus like the Kadashah of the Phoenicians
This survival of old superstition is unknown to missionary 'Handbooks,'
but amply deserves the study of the anthropologist.
The Phoenicians spread this androgynic worship over Greece. We
find the consecrated servants and votaries of Corinthian Aphrodite
called Hierodouli (Strabo viii. 6), who aided the ten thousand
courtesans in gracing the Venus-temple: from this excessive luxury
arose the proverb popularized by Horace. One of the headquarters
of the cult was Cyprus where, as Servius relates (Ad Aen. ii.
632), stood the simulacre of a bearded Aphrodite with feminine
body and costume, sceptered and mitred like a man. The sexes when
worshipping it exchanged habits and here the virginity was offered
in sacrifice: Herodotus (i. c. 199) describes this defloration
at Babylon but sees only the shameful part of the custom which
was a mere consecration of a tribal rite. Everywhere girls before
marriage belong either to the father or to the clan and thus the
maiden paid the debt due to the public before becoming private
property as a wife. The same usage prevailed in ancient Armenia
and in parts of Ethiopia; and Herodotus tells us that a practice
very much like the Babylonian 'is found also in certain parts
of the Island of Cyprus:' it is noticed by Justin (xviii. c. 5)
and probably it explains the 'Succoth Benoth' or Damsels' booths
which the Babylonians transplanted to the cities of Samaria.[36]
The Jews seem very successfully to have copied the abominations
of their pagan neighbours, even in the matter of the 'dog.'[37]
In the reign of wicked Rehoboam (975 B.C.) 'There were also sodomites
in the land and they did according to all the abominations of
the nations which the Lord cast out before the children of Israel'
(1 Kings xiv. 20). The scandal was abated by zealous King Asa
(958 B.C.) whose grandmother [38] was high-priestess of Priapus
(princeps in sacris Priapi): he 'tookawaythe sodomites out of
the land' (1 Kings xv. 12). Yet the prophets were loud in their
complaints, especially the so-called Isaiah (760 B.C.), 'except
the Lord of Hosts had left to us a very small remnant, we should
have been as Sodom' (i. 9); and strong measures were required
from good King Josiah (641 B.C.) who amongst other things, 'brake
down the houses of the sodomites that were by the house of the
Lord, where the women wove hangings for the grove' (2 Kings xxiii.
7). The bordels of boys (pueris alienis adhaeseverunt) appear
to have been near the Temple.
36 Some commentators understand 'the tabernacles
sacred to the reproductive powers of women;' and the Rabbis declare
that the emblem was the figure of a setting hen.
37 'Dog' is applied by the older Jews to the Sodomite
and the Catamite; and thus they understand the 'price of a dog'
which could not be brought into the Temple (Deut. xxiii. 18).
I have noticed it in one of the derivations of cinaedus and can
only remark that it is a vile libel upon the canine tribe.
38 Her name was Maachah and her title, according
to some, 'King's mother': she founded the sect of Communists who
rejected marriage and made adultery and incest part of worship
in their splendid temple. Such were the Basilians and the Carpocratians,
followed in the xith century by Tranchelin, whose sectarians,
the Turlupins, long infested Savoy.
Syria has not forgotten her old 'praxis.' At Damascus I found
some noteworthy cases amongst the religious of the great Amawi
Mosque. As for the Druses we have Burckhardt's authority (Travels
in Syria, etc., p. 202) 'unnatural propensities are very common
amongst them.'
The Sotadic Zone covers the whole of Asia Minor and Mesopotamia
now occupied by the 'unspeakable Turk,' a race of born pederasts;
and in the former region we first notice a peculiarity of the
feminine figure, the mammae inclinatae, jacentes et pannosae,
which prevails over all this part of the belt. Whilst the women
to the North and South have, with local exceptions, the mammae
stantes of the European virgin,[39] those of Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan
and Kashmir lose all the fine curves of the bosom, sometimes even
before the first child; and after it the hemispheres take the
form of bags. This cannot result from climate only; the women
of Maratha-land, inhabiting a damper and hotter region than Kashmir,
are noted for fine firm breasts even after parturition. Le Vice
of course prevails more in the cities and towns of Asiatic Turkey
than in the villages; yet even these are infected; while the nomad
Turcomans contrast badly in this point with the Gypsies, those-
Badawin of India. The Kurd population is of Iranian origin, which`
means that the evil is deeply rooted: I have noted in The Nights
that the great and glorious Saladin was a habitual pederast. The
Armenians, as their national character is, will prostitute themselves
for gain but prefer women to boys: Georgia supplied Turkey with
catamites whilst Circassia sent concubines. In Mesopotamia the
barbarous invader has almost obliterated the ancient civilization
which is antedated only by the Nilotic: the mysteries of old Babylon
nowhere survive save in certain obscure tribes like the Mandaeans,
the Devil-worshippers and the Ali-ilahi. Entering Persia we find
the reverse of Armenia; and, despite Herodotus, I believe that
Iran borrowed her pathologic love from the peoples of the Tigris-Euphrates
Valley and not from the then insignificant Greeks. But whatever
may be its origin, the corruption is now bred in the bone. It
begins in boyhood and many Persians account for it by paternal
severity. Youths arrived at puberty find none of the facilities
with which Europe supplies fornication. Onanism [40] is to a certain
extent discouraged by circumcision, and meddling with the father's
slave-girls and concubines would be risking cruel punishment if
not death. Hence they use each other by turns, a 'puerile practice'
known as Alish-Takish, the Lat. facere vicibus or mutuum facere
Temperament, media, and atavism recommend the custom to the general;
and after marrying and begetting heirs, Paterfamilias returns
to the Ganymede. Hence all the odes of Hafiz are addressed to
youths as proved by such Arabic exclamations as 'Afaka 'llah =
Allah assain thee (masculine) [4l]: the object is often fanciful
but it would be held coarse and immodest to address an imaginary
girl.[42] An illustration of the penchant is told at Shiraz concerning
a certain Mujtahid, the head of the Shi'ah creed, corresponding
with a prince-archbishop in Europe. A friend once said to him,
'There is a question I would fain address to your Eminence but
I lack the daring to do so.' 'Ask and fear not,' replied the Divine.
'It is this, O Mujtahid! Figure thee in a garden of roses and
hyacinths with the evening breeze waving the cypress-heads, a
fair youth of twenty sitting by thy side and the assurance of
perfect privacy. What, prithee, would be the result?' The holy
man bowed the chin of doubt upon the collar of meditation; and,
too honest to lie presently whispered, 'Allah defend me from such
temptation of Satan!' Yet even in Persia men have not been wanting
who have done their utmost to uproot the Vice: in the same Shiraz
they speak of a father who, finding his son in flagrant delict,
put him to death like Brutus or Lynch of Galway. Such isolated
cases, however, can effect nothmg. Chardin tells us that houses
of male prostitution were common in Persia whilst those of women
were unknown: the same is the case in the present day and the
boys are prepared with extreme care by diet, baths, depilation,
unguents and a host of artists in cosmetics. [43] Le Vice is looked
upon at most as a peccadillo and its mention crops up in every
jest-book. When the Isfahan man mocked Shaykh Sa'adi, by comparing
the bald pates of Shirazian elders to the bottom of a lota, a
brass cup with a wide-necked opening used in the Hammam, the witty
poet turned its aperture upwards and thereto likened the well-abused
podex of an Isfahani youth. Another favourite piece of Shirazian
'chaff' is to declare that when an Isfahan father would set up
his son in business he provides him with a pound of rice, meaning
that he can sell the result as compost for the kitchen-garden,
and with the price buy another meal: hence the saying Khakh-i-pai
kahu = the soil at the lettuce-root. The Isfahanis retort with
the name of a station or halting-place between the two cities
where, under pretence of making travellers stow away their riding-gear,
many a Shirazi had been raped: hence 'Zin o takaltu tu bi-bar'
= carry within saddle and saddle-cloth! A favourite Persian punishment
for strangers caught in the Harem or Gynaeceum is to strip and
throw them and expose them to the embraces of the grooms and negro
slaves. I once asked a Shirazi how penetration was possible if
the patient resisted with all the force of the sphincter muscle:
he smiled and said, 'Ah, we Persians know a trick to get over
that; we apply a sharpened tent-peg to the crupper-bone (os coccygis)
and knock till he opens.' A well-known missionary to the East
during the last generation was subjected to this gross insult
by one ofthe Persian Prince-governors, whom he had infuriated
by his conversion-mania: in his memoirs he alludes to it by mentioning
his 'dishonoured person;' but English readers cannot comprehend
the full significance of the confession. About the same time Skaykh
Nasr, Governor of Bushire, a man famed for facetious blackguardism,
used to invite European youngsters serving in the Bombay Marine
and ply them with liquor till they were insensible. Next morning
the middies mostly complained that the champagne had caused a
curious irritation and soreness in la parte-poste. The same Eastern
'Scrogin' would ask his guests if they had ever seen a mancannon
(Adami-top); and, on their replying in the negative, a greybeard
slave was dragged in blaspheming and struggling with all his strength.
He was presently placed on all fours and firmly held by the extremities;
his bag-trousers were let down and a dozen peppercorns were inserted
ano suo: the target was a sheet of paper held at a reasonable
distance; the match was applied by a pinch of cayenne in the nostrils;
the sneeze started the grapeshot and the number of hits on the
butt decided the bets. We can hardly wonder at the loose conduct
of Persian women perpetually mortified by marital pederasty. During
the unhappy campaign of 1856-7 in which, with the exception of
a few brilliant skirmishes, we gained no glory, Sir James Outram
and the Bombay army showing how badly they could work, there was
a formal outburst of the Harems; and even women of princely birth
could not be kept out of the officers' quarters.
39 A noted exception is Vienna, remarkable for
the enormous development of the virginal bosom which soon becomes
pendulent.
40 Gen. xxxviii. 2-ll. Amongst the classics Mercury
taught the 'Art of le Thalaba' to his son Pan who wandered about
the mountains distraught with love for the Nymph Echo and Pan
passed it on to the pastors. See Thalaba in Mirabeau.
41 The reader of The Nights
has remarked how often the 'he' in Arabic poetry denotes a 'she';
but the Arab, when uncontaminated by travel, ignores pederasty,
and the Arab poet is a Badawi.
42 So Moharnmed addressed his girl-wife Ayishah
in the masculine.
43 So amongst the Romans we have the Iatroliptae,
youths or girls who wiped the gymnast's perspiring body with swan-down,
a practice renewed by the professors of 'Massage'; Unctores who
applied perfumes and essences; Fricatrices and Tractatrices or
shampooers; Dropacistae, com-cutters; Alipilarii who plucked the
hair. etc.
The cities of Afghanistan and Sind are thoroughly saturated with
Persian vice, and the people sing
Kadr-i-kus Aughan danad, kadr-i-kunra Kabuli:
The worth of coynte the Afghan knows: Cabul prefers the other
chose![44]
44 It is a parody on the well-known song, Roebuck
i. sect. 2, No. 1602:
The goldsmith knows the worth of gold, jewellers
worth of jewelry
The worth of rose Bulbul can tell and Kambar's worth his lord,
Ali.
The Afghans are commercial travellers on a large scale and each
caravan is accompanied by a number of boys and lads almost in
woman's attire with kohl'd eyes and rouged cheeks, long tresses
and henna'd fingers and toes, riding luxuriously in Kajawas or
camel-panniers: they are called Kuch-i safari, or travelling wives,
and the husbands trudge patiently by their sides. In Afghanistan
also a frantic debauchery broke out amongst the women when they
found incubi who were not pederasts; and the scandal was not the
most insignificant cause of the general rising at Cabul (Nov.
1841), and the slaughter of Macnaghten, Burnes and other British
officers.
Resuming our way Eastward we find the Sikhs and the Moslems of
the Panjab much addicted to Le Vice, although the Himalayan tribes
to the north and those lying south, the Rajputs and Marathas,
ignore it. The same may be said of the Kashmirians who add another
Kappa to the tria Kakista, Kappadocians, Kretans, and Kilicians:
the proverb says,
Agar kaht-i-mardum uftad, az in sih jins kam giri;
Eki Afghan, dowum Sindi,[45] siyyum badjins-i-Kashmiri:
Though of men there be famine yet shun these three
Afghan, Sindi and rascally Kashmiri.
45 For 'Sindi' Roebuck ( Oriental
Proverbs Part i. p. 99) has Kunbu (Kumboh) a Panjabi peasant
and others vary the saying ad libitum. See vol. vi. 156.
M. Louis Daville describes the infamies of lajore and Lakhanu
where he found men dressed as women, with flowing locks under
crowns of flowers, imitating the feminine walk and gestures, voice
and fashion of speech, and ogling their admirers with all the
coquetry of bayadères. Victor Jacquemont's Journal de Voyage
describes the pederasty of Ranjit Singh, the 'Lion of the Panjab,'
and his pathic Gulab Singh whom the English inflicted upon Cashmir
as ruler by way of paying for his treason. Yet the Hindus, I repeat,
hold pederasty in abhorrence and are as much scandalized by being
called Gand-mara (anus-beater) or Gandu (anuser) as Englishmen
would be. During the years 1843-4 my regiment, almost all Hindu
Sepoys of the Bombay Presidency, was stationed at a purgatory
called Bandar Gharra,[46] a sandy flat with a scatter of verdigris-green
milk-bush some forty miles north of Karachi the headquarters.
The dirty heap of mud-and-mat hovels, which represented the adjacent
native village, could not supply a single woman; yet only one
case of pederasty came to light and that after a tragical fashion
some years afterwards. A young Brahman had connection with a soldier
comrade of low caste and this had continued till, in an unhappy
hour, the Pariah patient ventured to become the agent. The latter,
in Arab Al-Fa'il = the 'doer,' is not an object of contempt like
Al-Maful = the 'done'; and the high-caste sepoy, stung by remorse
and revenge, loaded his musket and deliberately shot his paramour.
He was hanged by court martial at Hyderabad and, when his last
wishes were asked he begged in vain to be suspended by the feet;
the idea being that his soul, polluted by exiting 'below the waist,'
would be doomed to endless transmigrations through the lowest
forms of life.
46 See Sind Revisited
i. 133-35
Beyond India, I have stated, the Sotadic Zone begins to broaden
out embracing all China, Turkistan and Japan. The Chinese, as
far as we know them in the great cities, are omnivorous and omnifutuentes:
they are the chosen people of debauchery and their systematic
bestiality with ducks, goats, and other animals is equalled only
by their pederasty. Kaempfer and Orlof Torée (Voyage en
Chine) notice the public houses for boys and youths in China and
Japan. Mirabeau (L'Anandryne) describes the tribadism of their
women in hammocks. When Pekin was plundered the Harems contained
a number of balls a little larger than the old musket-bullet,
made of thin silver with a loose pellet of brass inside somewhat
like a grelot:[47] these articles were placed bythe women between
the labia and an up-and-down movement on the bed gave a pleasant
titlllation when nothing better was to be procured. They have
every artifice of luxury, aphrodisiacs, erotic perfumes and singular
applications. Such are the pills which, dissolved in water and
applied to the glans penis;cause it to throb and swelli: so according
to Amerigo Vespucci Amerlcan women could artificially increase
the size of their husbands' parts. [48] The Chinese bracelet of
caoutchouc studded with points now takes the place of the Herisson,
or Annulus hirsutus,[49] which was bound between the glans and
prepuce. Of the penis succedaneus, that imitation of the Arbor
vitae or Soter Kosmou, which the Latins called phallus and fascinum,[50]
the French godemiché and the Italians passatempo and diletto
(whence our 'dildo'), every kind abounds varying from a stuffed
'French letter' to a cone of ribbed horn which looks like an instrument
of torture. For the use of men they have the 'merkin,'[5l] a heart-shaped
article of thin skin stuffed with cotton and slit with an artificial
vagina: two tapes at the top and one below lash it to the back
of a chair. The erotic literature of the Chinese and Japanese
is highly developed and their illustrations are often facetious
as well as obscene. All are familiar with that of the strong man
who by a blow with his enormous phallus shivers a copper pot;
and the ludicrous contrast of the huge-membered wights who land
in the Isle of Women and presently escape from it, wrinkled and
shrivelled, true Domine Dolittles. Of Turkistan we know little,
but what we know confirms my statement. Mr. Schuyler in his Turkistan
(i. 132) offers an illustration of a 'Batchah' (Pers. bachcheh
= catamite), 'or singing-boy surrounded by his admirers.' Of the
Tartars Master Purchas laconically says (v 419), 'They are addicted
to Sodomie or Buggerie.' The learned casuist Dr. Thomas Sanchez
the Spaniard had (says Mirabeau in Kadhésch) to decide
a difficult question concerning the sinfulness of a peculiar erotic
perversion. The Jesuits brought home from Manilla a tailed man
whose moveable prolongation of the os coccygis measured from 7
to 10 inches he had placed himself between two women, enjoying
one naturally while the other used his tail as a penis succedaneus.
The verdict was incomplete sodomy and simple fornication. For
the islands north of Japan, the 'Sodomitical Sea,' and the 'nayle
of tynne' thrust through the prepuce to prevent sodomy, see Lib.
ii. chap. 4 of Master Thomas Caudishe's Circumnavigation and vol.
Vi of Oinckerton's Geography translated by Walckenaere.
47 They must not be confounded with the grelots
lascifs, the little bells of gold or silver set by the people
of Pegu in the prepuce-skin, and described by Nicolo de Conti
who however refused to undergo the operation.
48 Relation des découvertesfaites
par Colomb etc p 137, Bologna 1875 also Vespucci's letter in
Ramusio (i. 131) and Paro's Recherches philosophiques
sur les Américains.
49 See Mantegazza loc cit. who borrows from the
Thèse de Paris of Dr. Abel Hureau
de Villeeneuve, 'Frictiones per coitum productae magnum mucosae
membranae vaginalis turgorem, ac simul hujus cuniculi coarctationem
tam maritis salacibus quaeritatam afferunt.'
50 Fascinus is the Priapus-god to whom the Vestal
Virgins of Rome professed tribades, sacrificed; also the neck-charm
in phallus-shape. Fascinum is the male member.
51 Captain Grose (Lexicon Balatronicum) explains
merkin as 'counterfeit hair for women's privy parts. See Bailey's
Dict.' The Bailey of 1764 an 'improved edition,' does not contain
the word which is now generaliy applied to a cunnus succedaneus.
Passing over to America we find that the Sotadic Zone contains
the whole hemisphere from Behring's Straits to Magellan's. This
prevalence of 'mollities' astonishes the anthropologist, who is
apt to consider pederasty the growth of luxury and the especial
product of great and civilized cities, unnecessary and therefore
unknown to simple savâgery where the births of both sexes
are about equal and female infanticide is not practised. In many
parts of the New World this perversion was accompanied by another
depravity of taste - confirmed cannibalism.[52] The forests and
campos abounded in game from the deer to the pheasant-like penelope,
and the seas and rivers produced an unfailing supply of excellent
fish and shell-fish;[53] yet the Brazilian Tupis preferred the
meat of man to every other food.
52 I have noticed this phenomenal cannibalism
in my notes to Mr. Albert Tootle's excellent translation of The
Captivity of Hans Stade of Hesse, London, Hakluyt Society,
mdccclxxiv.
53 The Ostreiras or shell mounds of the Brazil,
sometimes 200 feet high, are described by me in Anthropologia
No. i. Oct. 1873.
A glance at Mr. Bancrofts [54] proves the abnormal development
of sodomy amongst the savages and barbarians of the New World.
Even his half-frozen Hyperboreans 'possess all the passions which
are supposed to develop most freely under a milder temperature'
(i. 58). 'The voluptuousness and polygamy of the North American
Indians, under a temperature of almost perpetual winter is far
greater than that of the most sensual tropical nations' (Martin's
Brit. Colonies iii. 524). I can quote only a few of the most
remarkable instances. Of the Koniagas of Kadiak Island and the
Thinkleets we read (i. 81-82), 'The most repugnant of all their
practices is that of male concubinage. A Kadiak mother will select
her handsomest and most promising boy, and dress and rear him
as a girl, teaching him only domestic duties, keeping him at women's
work, associating him with women and girls, in order to render
his effeminacy complete. Arriving at the age of ten or fifteen
years, he is married to some wealthy man who regards such a companion
as â great acquisition These male concubines are called
Achnutschik or Schopans' (the authorities quo ed being Holmberg,
Langsdorff, Billing, Choris, Lisiansky and Marchand). The same
is the case in Nutka Sound and the Aleutian Islands, where 'male
concubinage obtains throughout, but not to the same extent as
amongst the Koniagas.' The objects of 'unnatural' affection have
their beards carefully plucked ouc as soon as the face-hair begins
to grow, and their chins are tattooed like those of the women.
In California the first missionaries found the same practice,
the youths being called Joya (Bancroft, i. 415 and authorities
Palon, Crespi, Boscana, Motras, Torquemada, Duflot and Fages).
The Comanches unite incest with sodomy (i. 515). 'In New Mexico
according to Arlegui, Ribas, and other authors, male concubinage
prevails to a great extent, these loathsome semblances of humanity,
whom to call beastly were a slander upon beasts, dress themselves
in the clothes and perform the functions of women, the use of
weapons being denied them' (i. 585). Pederasty was systematically
practised by the peoples of Cueba, Careta, and other parts of
Central America. The Caciques and some of the headmen kept harems
of youths who, as soon as destined for the unclean office, were
dressed as women. They went by the name of Camayoas, and were
hated and detested by the goodwives (i. 773-4) Of the Nahua nations
Father Pierre de Gand (alias de Musa) writes; 'Un certain nombre
de prêtres n'avaient point de femmes, sed eorum loco pueros
quibus abutebantur. Ce péché était si commun
dans ce pays que, Jeunes ou vieux, tous étaient infectés;
ils y étaient si adonnés que mêmes les enfants
de six ans s'y livraient' (Ternaux-Campans, Voyages, Série
i. Tom. x. p. 197). Among the Mayas of Yucatan Las Casas declares
that the great prevalence of 'unnatural' lust made parents anxlous
to see their progeny wedded as soon as possible (Kingsborough's
Mex. Ant. viii. 135). In Vera Paz a god, called by some Chin and
by others Cavial and Maran, taught it by committing the act with
another god. Some fathers gave their sons a boy to use as a woman,
and if any other approached this pathic he was treated as an adulterer.
In Yucatan images were found by Bernal Diaz proving the sodomitical
propensities of the people (Bancroft v. 198). De Pauw (Recherches
Philosophiques sur les Américains, London, 1771) has
much to say about the subject in Mexico generally: in the northern
provinces men married youths who, dressed like women, were forbidden
to carry arms. Accord ing to Gomara there were at Tamalipas houses
of male prostitution; and from Diaz and others we gather that
the pecado nefando was the rule Both in Mexico and in Peru it
might have caused, if it did not ustlfy, the cruelties of the
Conquistadores. Pederasty was also general throughout Nicaragua,
and the early explorers found it amongst the indigenes of Panama.
54 The Native Races of
the Pacific States of South America, by Herbert Howe Bancroft,
London, Longmans, 1875.
We have authentic details concerning Le Vice in Peru and its adJacent
lands, beginning with Cieza de Leon, who must be read in the original
or in the translated extracts of Purchas (vol. v. 942, etc.),
not in the cruelly castrated form preferred by the Council of
the Hakluyt Society. Speaking of the New Granada Indians he tells
us that 'at Old Port (Porto Viejo) and Puna, the Deuill so farre
prevayled in their beastly Deuotions that there were Boyes consecrated
to serue in the Temple; and at the times of their Sacrifices and
Solemne Feasts, the Lords and principall men abused them to that
detestable filthinesse;' i e. performed their peculiar worshlp.
(>enerally m tne nlll-countrles the Devil, under the show of
holiness, had introduced the practice; for every temple or chief
house of adoration kept one or two men or more which were attired
like women, even from the time of their childhood, and spake like
them, imitating them in everything; with these, under pretext
of holiness and religion, their principal men on principal days
had commerce. Speaking of the arrival of the Giants [55] at Point
Santa Elena, Cieza says (chap. Iii.), they were detested by the
natives, because in using their women they killed them, and their
men also in another way. All the natives declare that God brought
upon them a punishment proportioned to the enormity of their offence.
When they were engaged together in their accursed intercourse,
a fearful and terrible fire came down from Heaven with a great
noise, out of the midst of which there issued a shining Angel
with a glittering sword, wherewith at one blow they were all killed
and the fire consumed them.[56] There remained a few bones and
skulls which God allowed to bide unconsumed by the fire, as a
memorial of this punishment. In the Hakluyt Society's bowdlerization
we read of the Tumbez Islanders being 'very vicious, many of them
committing the abominable offence' (p. 24); also, 'If by the advice
of the Devil any Indian commit the abominable crime, it is thought
little of and they call him a woman.' In chapters lii. and lviii.
we find exceptions. The Indians of Huancabamba, 'although so near
the peoples of Puerto Viejo and Guayaquil, do not commit the abominable
sin;' and the Serranos, or island mountaineers, as sorcerers and
magicians inferior to the coast peoples, were not so much addicted
to sodomy.
55 All Peruvian historians mention these giants
who were probably the large-limbed Caribs (Caraibes) of the Brazil:
they will ie noticed in page 186.
56 This sounds much like a pious fraud of the
missionaries, a Europeo-American version of the Sodom legend.
The Royal Commentaries of the Yncas shows that the evil was of
a comparatively modern growth. In the early period of Peruvian
history the people considered the crime 'unspeakable:' if a Cuzco
Indian, not | of Yncarial blood, angrily addressed the term pederast
to another, he was held infamous for many days. One of the generals
having reported to the Ynca Ccapacc Yupanqui that there were some
sodomites, not in all the valleys, but one here and one there,
'nor was it a habit of all the inhabitants but only of certain
persons who practised it privately,' the ruler ordered that the
criminals should be publicly burnt alive and their houses, crops
and trees destroyed: moreover, to show his abomination, he commanded
that the whole village should so be treated if one man fell into
this habit (Lib. iii. cap. 13). Elsewhere we learn, 'There were
sodomites in some provinces, though not openly nor universally,
but some particular men and in secret. In some parts they had
them in their templesa because the Devil persuaded them that the
Gods took great delight in such people, and thus the Devil acted
as a traitor to remove the veil of shame that the Gentiles felt
for this crime and to accustom them to commit it in public and
in common.'
During the times of the Conquistadores male concubinage had become
the rule throughout Peru. At Cuzco, we are told by Nuno de Guzman
in 1530, 'The last which was taken, and which fought most couragiously,
was a man in the habite of a woman, which confessed that from
a childe he had gotten his liuing by that filthinesse, for which
I caused him to be burned.' V. F. Lopez [57] draws a frightful
picture of pathologic love in Peru. Under the reigns which followed
that of IntiKapak (Ccapacc) Amauri, the country was attacked by
invaders of a giant race coming from the sea: they practised pederasty
after a fashion so shameless that the conquered tribes were compelled
to fly (p. 271). Under the pre-Yncarial Amauta, or priestly dynasty,
Peru had lapsed into savagery and the kings of Cuzco preserved
only the name. 'Toutes ces hontes et toutes ces misères
provenaient de deux vices infâmes, la bestialité
et la sodomie. Les femmes surtout étaient offensées
de voir la nature frustrée de tous ses droits. Elles pleuraient
ensemble en leurs réunions sur le misérable état
dans lequel elles étaient tombées, sur le mépris
avec lequel elles étaient traitées.... Le monde
était renversé, les hommes s'aimaient et étaient
jaloux les uns des autres.... Elles cherchaient, mais en vain,
les moyens de remédier au mal; elles employaient des herbes
et des recettes diaboliques qui leur ramenaient bien quelques
individus, mais ne pouvaient arrêter les progrès
incessants du vice. Cet état de choses constitua un véritable
moyen age, qui dura jusqu'à l'établissement du gouvernement
des Incas' (p. 277).
57 Les Races Aryennes
du Pérou, Paris, Franck, 1871.
When Sinchi Roko (the xcvth of Montesinos and the xcist of Garcilazo)
became Ynca, he found morals at the lowest ebb. 'Ni la prudence
de l'Inca, ni les lois sévères qu'il avait promulguées
n'avaient pu extirper entièrement le péché
contre nature. Il reprit avec une nouvelle violence, et les femmes
en furent si jalouses qu'un grand nombre d'elles tuèrent
leurs maris. Les devins et les sorciers passaient leurs journées
à fabriquer, avec certaines herbes, des compositions magiques
qui rendaient fous ceux qui en mangaient, et les femmes en faisaient
prendre, soit dans les aliments, soit dans la chicha, à
ceux dont elles étaient jalouses' (p. 291).
I have remarked that the Tupi races of the Brazil were infamous
for cannibalism and sodomy; nor could the latter be only racial
as proved by the fact that colonists of pure Lusitanian blood
followed in the path of the savages. Sr. Antonio Augusto da Costa
Aguiars8 is out-spoken upon this point. 'A crime which in England
leads to the gallows, and which is the very measure of abject
depravity, passes with impunity amongst us by the participating
in it of almost all or of many (de quasi todos, ou de muitos).
Ah! if the wrath of Heaven were to fall by way of punishing such
crimes (delictos), more than one city of this Empire, more than
a dozen, would pass into the category of the Sodoms and Gomorrahs
(p- 30)- Till late years pederasty in the Brazil was looked upon
as a peccadillo; the European immigrants following the practice
of the wild men who were naked but not, as Columbus said, 'clothed
in innocence'. One of Her Majesty's Consuls used to tell a tale
of the hilarity provoked in a 'fashionable' assembly by the open
declaration of a young gentleman that his mulatto-'patient' had
suddenly turned upon him, insisting upon becoming agent. Now,
however, under the influences of improved education and respect
for the public opinion of Europe, pathologic love amongst the
Luso-Brazilians has been reduced to the normal limits.
58 0 Brazil e os Brazileiros.
Santos. 1862.
Outside the Sotadic Zone, I have said, Le Vice is sporadic, not
endemic: yet the physical and moral effect of great cities where
puberty, they say, is induced earlier than in country sites, has
been the same in most lands, causing modesty to decay and pederasty
to flourish. The Badawi Arab is wholly pure of Le Vice; yet San'a
the capital of Al-Yaman and other centres of population have long
been and still are thoroughly infected. History tells us of Zu
Shanatir, tyrant of 'Arabia Felix,' in 478, A.D. who used to entice
young men into his palace and cause them after use to be cast
out of the windows: this unkindly ruler was at last poinarded
by the youth Zerash, known from his long ringlets as 'Zu Nowas.'
The negro race is mostly untainted by sodomy and tribadism. Yet
Joan dos Sanctos [59] found in Cacongo of West Africa certain
'Chibudi, which are men attyred like women and behaue them selves
womanly, ashamed to be called men; are also married to men, and
esteem that vnnaturale damnation an honor.' Madagascar also delighted
in dancing and singing boys dressed as girls. In the Empire of
Dahomey I noted a corps of prostitutes kept for the use of the
Amazon-soldieresses .
59 Aethiopia Orientalis,
Purchas ii. 1558.
North of the Sotadic Zone we find local but notable instances.
Master Christopher Burrough [60] describes on the western side
of the Volga 'a very fine stone castle, called by the name Oueak,
and adioyning to the same a Towne called by the Russes, Sodom,
. . . which was swallowed into the earth by the iustice of God,
for the wickednesse of the people' Again: although as a rule Christianity
has steadily opposed pathologic love both in writing and preaching,
there have been remark able exceptions. Perhaps the most curious
idea was that of certain medical writers in the middle ages: 'Usus
et amplexus pueri, bene temperatus, salutaris medicina' (Tardieu).
Bayle notices (under 'Vayer') the infamous book of Giovanni della
Casa, Archbishop of Benevento 'De laudibus Sodomiae,'[6l] vulgarly
known as 'Capitolo del Forno.' The same writer refers (under 'Sixte
iv') to the report that the Dominican Order, which systematically
decried Le Vice, had presented a request to the Cardinal di Santa
Lucia that sodomy might be lawful during three months per annum,
June to August; and that the Cardinal had underwritten the petition
'Be it done as they demand.' HencetheFaeda Venus of Battista Mantovano.
Bayle rejects the history for a curious reason, venery being colder
in summer than in winter, and quotes the proverb 'Aux mois qui
n'ont pas d' R, peu embrasser et bien boire. ' But in the case
of a celibate priesthood such scandals are inevitable. Witness
the famous Jesuit epitaph Ci-gît un Jésuite, etc.
60 Purchas iii. 243
61 For a literal translation see Ire
Série de la Curiosité Littéraire et Bibliographique,
Paris, Liseux, 1880.
In our modern capitals, London, Berlin and Paris for instance,
the Vice seems subject to periodical outbreaks. For many years,
also, England sent her pederasts to Italy, and especially to Naples
whence originated the term 'Il vizio Inglese.' It would be invidious
to detail the scandals which of late years have startled the public
in London and Dublin: for these the cunous will consult the police
reports. Berlin, despite her strong flavour of Phariseeism, Puritanism
and Chauvinism in religion, manners and morals, is not a whit
better than her neighbours. Dr. Gaspar,[62] a well-known authority
on the subject, adduces many interesting cases especially an old
Count Cajus and his six accomplices. Amongst his many correspondents
one suggested to him that not only Plato and Julius Caesar but
also Winckelmann and Platen (?) belonged to the Society; and he
had found it flourishing in Palermo, the Louvre, the Scottish
Highlands and St. Petersburg, to name only a few places. Frederick
the Great is said to have addressed these words to his nephew,
'Je puis votls assurer, par mon expérience personelle,
que ce plaisir est peu agréable à cultiver.' This
suggests the popular anecdote of Voltaire and the Englishman who
agreed upon an 'experience' and found it far from satisfactory.
A few days afterwards the latter informed the Sage of Ferney that
he had tried it again and provoked the exclamation, 'Once a philosopher:
twice a sodomite!' The last revival of the kind in Germany is
a society at Frankfort and its neighbourhood, self-styled Les
Cravates Noires in opposition, I suppose, to Les Cravates Blanches
of A. Belot.
62 His best known works are (1) Praktisches
Handbuch der Gechtlichener Medecin, Berlin, 1860; and (2) Klinische
Novellen zur gerechtlichen Medicin, Berlin. 1863.
Paris is by no means more depraved than Berlin and London; but,
whilst the latter hushes up the scandal, Prenchmen do not: hence
we see a more copious account of it submitted to the public. For
France of the xviith century consult the Histoire de la Prostitution
chez tous les Peuples du Monde, and La France devenue Italienne,
a treatise which generally follows L'Histoire Amoureuse des
Gaules by Bussy, Comte de Rabutin. [63] The headquarters of
male prostitution were then in the Champ Flory, i.e., Champ de
Flore, the privileged rendezvous of low courtesans In the xviiith
century, 'quand le Français à tête folle,'
as Voltaire sings, invented the term 'Péché philosophique,'
there was a temporary recrudescence; and, after the death of Pidauzet
de Mairobert (March, 1779), his Apologie de la Secte Anandryne
was published in L'Espion Anglais. In those days the Allée
des Veuves in the Champs Elysées had a 'fief reservé
des Ebugors' [64]- 'veuve' in the language of Sodom being the
maîtresse en titre, the favourite youth.
63 The same author printed another imitation of
Petronius Arbiter, the 'Larissa' story of Théophile Viand.
His cousin, the Sévigné, highly approved of it.
See Bayle's objections to Rabutin's delicacy and excuses for Petronius'
grossness in his 'Éclaircissement sur les obscénités'
(Appendice au Dictionnaire Antique).
64 The Boulgrin of Rabelais, which Urquhart renders
Ingle for Boulgre an 'indorser," derived from the Bulgarus
or Bulgarian, who gave to Italy the term bugiardo - liar. Bougre
and Bougrerie date (Littré) from the xiiith century. I
cannot however, but think that the trivial term gained strength
in the xvith when the manners of the Bugres or indigenous Brazilians
were studied by Huguenot refugees in La France Antartique and
several of these savages found their way to Europe. A grand Fête
in Rouen on the entrance of Henri II and Dame Katherine de Medicis
(June 16, 1564) showed, as part of the pageant three hundred men
(including fifty 'Bugres' or Tupis) with parroquets and other
birds and beasts of the newly explored regions. The procession
is given in the four-folding woodcut 'Figure des Brésiliens'
in Jean de Prest's Edition of 1551.
At the decisive moment of monarchical decomposition Mirabeau [65]
declares that pederasty was reglementée and adds, 'Le goût
des pédérastes, quoique moins en vogue que du temps
de Henri III. (the French Heliogabalus), sous le règne
desquel les hommes se provoquaient mutuellement [66] sous les
portiques du Louvre, fait des progrès considérables.
On sait que cette ville (Paris) est un chef-d'œuvre de police;
en conséquence, il y a des lieux publics autorisés
a cet effet. Les jeunes gens qui se destinent à la profession,
sont soigneusement enclassés; car les systèmes réglementaires
s'étendent jusques-là. On les examine; ceux qui
peuvent être agents et patients, qui sont beaux, vermeils,
bien faits, potelés, sont réservés pour les
grands seigneurs, ou se font payer très cher par les évêques
et les financiers. Ceux qui sont privés de leurs testicules,
ou en termes de l'art (car notre langue est plus chaste qui nos
mœurs), qui n'ont pas le poids du tisserand, mais qui donnent
et reçoivent, forment la seconde classe; ils sont encore
chers, parceque lesfemmes en usent tandis qu'ils servent aux hommes.
Ceux qui ne sont plus susceptibles d'érection tant ils
sont usés, quoiqu'ils aient tous ces organes nécessaires
au plaisir, s'inscrivent comme patiens purs, et composent la troisieme
classe: mais celle qui préside à ces plaisirs, vérifie
leur impuissance. Pour cet effet, on les place tout nus sur un
matelas ouvert par la moitié inférieure; deux filles
les caressent de leur mieux, pendant qu'une troisième frappe
doucement avec des orties naissantes le siège des désirs
vénériens. Après un quart d'heure de cet
essai, on leur introduit dans l'anus un poivre long rouge qui
cause une irritation considérable; on pose sur les échauboulures
produites par les orties, de la moutarde fine de Caudebec, et
l'on passe le gland au camphre. Ceux qui résistent à
ces épreuves et ne donnent aucun signe d'érection,
servent comme patiens à un tiers de paie seulement'. [67]
65 Erotika Biblion
chapt. Kadésch (pp. 93 et seq.) Edition de Bruxelles wlth
notes by the Chevalier P. Pierrugues of Bordeaux, before noticed.
66 Called Chevaliers de Paille because the sign
was a straw in the mouth, à la Palmerston.
67 I have noticed that the eunuch in Sind was
as meanly paid and have given the reason.
The Restoration and the Empire made the police more vigilant in
matters of politics than of morals. The favourite club, which
had its mot de passe, was in the Rue Doyenne, old quarter St.
Thomas des Louvre; and the house was a hôtel of the xviith
century. Two street-doors, on the right for the male gynaeceum
and the left for the female, opened at 4 p.m. in winter and 8
p.m. in summer. A decoy-lad, charmingly dressed in women's clothes,
with big haunches and small waist, promenaded out side; and this
continued till 1826 when the police put down the house.
Under Louis Philippe, the conquest of Algiers had evil results,
according to the Marquis de Boissy. He complained without ambages
of mœurs Arabes in French regiments, and declared that the
result of the African wars was an éffrayable débordement
pédérastique, even as the vérole resulted
from the Italian campaigns of that age of passion, the xvith century.
From the military the fléau spread to civilian society
and the Vice took such expansion and intensity that it may be
said to have been democratized in cities and large towns; at least
so we gather from the Dossier des Agissements des Pédérastes.
A general gathering of 'La Sainte Congrégation des glorieux
Pédérastes' was held in the old Petite Rue des Marais
where, after the theatre, many resorted under pretext of making
water. They ranged themselves along the walls of a vast garden
and exposed their podices: bourgeois, richards and nobles came
with full purses, touched the part which most attracted them and
were duly followed by it. At the Allée des Veuves the crowd
was dangerous from 7 to 8 p.m.: no policeman or ronde de nuit
dared venture in it; cords were stretched from tree to tree and
armed guards drove away strangers amongst whom, they say, was
once Victor Hugo. This nuisance was at length suppressed by the
municipal administration.
The Empire did not improve morals. Balls of sodomites were held
at No. 8 Place de la Madeleine where, on Jan. 2, '64, some one
hundred and fifty men met, all so well dressed as women that even
the landlord did not recognize them. There was also a club for
sotadic debauchery called the Cent Gardes and the Dragons de l'Impératrice.[68]
They copied the imperial toilette and kept it in the general wardrobe:
hence 'faire Impératrice) meant to be used carnally. The
site, a splendid hotel in the Allée des Veuves, was discovered
by the Procureur-Général who registered all the
names; but, as these belonged to not a few senators and dignitaries)
the Emperor wisely quashed proceedings. The club was broken up
on July 16, '64. During the same year La Petite Revue, edited
by M. Loredan Larchy, son of the General, printed an article,
'Les échappés de Sodome': it discusses the letter
of M. Castagnary to the Progrès de Lyons and declares that
the Vice had been adopted by plusieurs corps de troupes. For its
latest developments as regards the chantage of the tantes (pathics),
the reader will consult the last issues of Dr. Tardieu's well-known
Etudes.[69] He declares that the servant-class is most infected;
and that the Vice is commonest between the ages of fifteen and
twenty-five.
68 Centuria Librorum Absconditorum
(by Pisanus Fraxi) 4to, p. Ix. and 593. London. Privately printed,
mdccclxxix.
69 A friend learned in these matters supplies
me with the following list of famous pederasts. Those who marvel
at the wide diffusion of such erotic perversion, and its being
affected by so many celebrities, will bear in mind that the greatest
men have been some of the worst: Alexander of Macedon, Julius
Caesar and Napoleon Buonaparte held themselves high above the
moral law which obliges common-place humanity. All three are charged
with the Vice. Of Kings we have Henri iii., Louis xiii. and xviii.,
Frederick ii. of Prussia, Peter the Great, William ii. of Holland
and Charles ii. and iii. of Parma. We find also Shakespeare (i.,
xv., Edit. François Hugo) and Molière, Theodorus
Beza, Lully (the Composer), D'Assoucy, Count Zintzendorff, the
Grand Condé, Marquis de Villette, Pierre Louis Farnèse,
Duc de la Vallière, De Soleinne Count D'Avaray, Saint Mégrin,
D'Epernon, Admiral de la Susse, La RochePouchin Rochfort S. Louis,
Henne (the Spiritualist), Comte Horace de Viel Castel, Lerminin,
Fievée, Théodore Leclerc, Archi-Chancellier Cambacèrés
Marquis de Custine, Sainte-Beuve and Count D'Orsay. For others
refer to the three volumes of Pisanus Fraxi: Index
Librorum Prohibitorum (London, 1877), Centuria Librorum
Absconditorum (before alluded to) and Catena Librorum Tacendorums
London, 1885. The indices will supply the names.
The pederasty of The Nights may briefly be distributed
into three categories. The first is the funny form, as the unseemly
practical joke of masterful Queen Budur (vol. iii. 300-306) and
the not less hardi jest of the slave-princess Zumurrud (vol. iv.
226). The second is in the grimmest and most earnest phase of
the perversion, for instance where Abu Nowas [70] debauches the
three youths (vol. v. 64-69); whilst in the third form it is wisely
and learnedly discussed, to be severely blamed, by the Shaykhah
or Reverend Woman (vol. v. 154).
70 Of this peculiar character Ibn Khallikan remarks
(ii. 43), 'There were four poets whose works clearly contraried
their character. Abu al-Atahiyah wrote plous poems himself being
an atheist, Abu Hukayma's verses proved his lmpotence, yet he
was more salacious than a he-goat; Mohammed ibn Hazim pralsed
contentments yet he was greedier than a dog; and Abu Nowas hymned
the Joys of sodomy, yet he was more sassionate for women than
a baboon.'
To conclude this part of my subject, the éclaircissement
des obscénités. Many readers will regret the absence
from The Nights of that modesty which distinguishes Amadis
de Gaul; whose author when leaving a man and a maid together says,
'And nothing shall be here related; for these and suchlike things
which are conformable neither to good conscience nor nature, man
ought in reason lightly to pass over, holding them in slight esteem
as they deserve.' Nor have we less respect for Palmerin of England
who after a risqué scene declares, 'Herein is no offence
offered to the wise by wanton speeches, or encouragement to the
loose by lascivious matter.' But these are not oriental ideas
and we must e'en take the Eastern as we find him. He still holds
'Naturalia non sunt turpia,' together with 'Mundis omnia munda';
and, as Bacon assures us the mixture of a lie doth add to pleasure,
so the Arab enjoys the startling and lively contrast of extreme
virtue and horrible vice placed in juxtaposition.
Those who have read through these ten volumes will agree with
me that the proportion of offensive matter bears a very small
ratio to the mass of the work. In an age saturated with cant and
hypocrisy, here and there a venal pen will mourn over the 'Pornography'
of The Nights, dwell upon the 'Ethics of Dirt' and the 'Garbage
of the Brothel'; and will lament the 'wanton dissemination (!)
of ancient and filthy fiction.' This self-constituted Censor morum
reads Aristophanes and Plato, Horace and Virgil, perhaps even
Martial and Petronius, because 'veiled in the decent obscurity
of a learned language;' he allows men Latinè loqui; but
he is scandalized at stumbling-blocks much less important in plain
English. To be consistent he must begin by bowdlerizing not only
the classics, with which boys' and youths' minds and memories
are soaked and saturated at schools and colleges, but also Boccaccio
and Chaucer, Shakespeare and Rabelais; Burton, Sterne, Swift and
a long list of works which are yearly reprinted and republished
without a word of protest. Lastly, why does not this inconsistent
puritan purge the Old Testament of its allusions to human ordure
and the pudenda; to carnal copulation and impudent whoredom, to
adultery and fornication, to onanism, sodomz, and bestiality?
But this he will not do, the whited sepulchre! To the interested
critic of the Edinburgh Review (No. 335 of July, 1886), I return
my warmest thanks for his direct and deliberate falsehoods: -
lies are one-legged and short-lived, and venom evaporates. [7l]
It appears to me that when I show to such men, so 'respectable
and so impure, a landscape of magnificent prospects whose vistas
are adorned with every charm of nature and art, they point their
unclean noses at a little heap of muck here and there lying in
a field-corner.
71 A virulently and unjustly abusive critique
never yet injured its object: in fact it is generally the greatest
favour an author's unfriends can bestow upon him. But to notice
in a popular Review books which have been printed and not published
is hardly in accordance with the established courtesies of literature.
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