§ IV.
SOCIAL CONDITION.
I here propose to treat of the Social Condition which The Nights
discloses, of Al-Islam at the earlier period of its development,
concerning the position of women and about the pornology of the
great Saga-book.
A.--Al-Islam.
A splendid and glorious life was that of Baghdad in the days of
the mighty Caliph,[FN#310] when the Capital had towered to the
zenith of grandeur and was already trembling and tottering to the
fall. The centre of human civilisation, which was then confined
to Greece and Arabia, and the metropolis of an Empire exceeding
in extent the widest limits of Rome, it was essentially a city of
pleasure, a Paris of the ixth century. The "Palace of Peace" (Dár
al-Salám), worthy successor of Babylon and Nineveh, which had
outrivalled Damascus, the "Smile of the Prophet," and Kufah, the
successor of Hira and the magnificent creation of Caliph Omar,
possessed unrivalled advantages of site and climate. The Tigris-
Euphrates Valley, where the fabled Garden of Eden has been
placed, in early ages succeeded the Nile- Valley as a great
centre of human development; and the prerogative of a central and
commanding position still promises it, even in the present state
of decay and desolation under the unspeakable Turk, a magnificent
future,[FN#311] when railways and canals shall connect it with
Europe. The city of palaces and government offices, hotels and
pavilions, mosques and colleges, kiosks and squares, bazars and
markets, pleasure grounds and orchards, adorned with all the
graceful charms which Saracenic architecture had borrowed from
the Byzantines, lay couched upon the banks of the Dijlah-Hiddekel
under a sky of marvellous purity and in a climate which makes
mere life a "Kayf"--the luxury of tranquil enjoyment. It was
surrounded by far extending suburbs, like Rusafah on the Eastern
side and villages like Baturanjah, dear to the votaries of
pleasure; and with the roar of a gigantic capital mingled the hum
of prayer, the trilling of birds, the thrilling of harp and lute,
the shrilling of pipes, the witching strains of the professional
Almah, and the minstrel's lay.
The population of Baghdad must have been enormous when the
smallest number of her sons who fell victims to Huláku Khan in
1258 was estimated at eight hundred thousand, while other
authorities more than double the terrible "butcher's bill." Her
policy and polity were unique. A well regulated routine of
tribute and taxation, personally inspected by the Caliph; a
network of waterways, canaux d'arrosage; a noble system of
highways, provided with viaducts, bridges and caravanserais, and
a postal service of mounted couriers enabled it to collect as in
a reservoir the wealth of the outer world. The facilities for
education were upon the most extended scale; large sums, from
private as well as public sources, were allotted to Mosques, each
of which, by the admirable rule of Al-Islam, was expected to
contain a school: these establishments were richly endowed and
stocked with professors collected from every land between
Khorasan and Marocco;[FN#312] and immense libraries[FN#313]
attracted the learned of all nations. It was a golden age for
poets and panegyrists, koranists and literati, preachers and
rhetoricians, physicians and scientists who, besides receiving
high salaries and fabulous presents, were treated with all the
honours of Chinese Mandarins; and, like these, the humblest
Moslem--fisherman or artizan--could aspire through knowledge or
savoir faire to the highest offices of the Empire. The effect was
a grafting of Egyptian, and old Mesopotamian, of Persian and
Græco-Latin fruits, by long Time deteriorated, upon the strong
young stock of Arab genius; and the result, as usual after such
imping, was a shoot of exceptional luxuriance and vitality. The
educational establishments devoted themselves to the three main
objects recognised by the Moslem world, Theology, Civil Law and
Belles Lettres; and a multitude of trained Councillors enabled
the ruling powers to establish and enlarge that complicated
machinery of government, at once concentrated and decentralized,
a despotism often fatal to the wealthy great but never neglecting
the interests of the humbler lieges, which forms the beau idéal
of Oriental administration. Under the Chancellors of the Empire
the Kazis administered law and order, justice and equity; and
from their decisions the poorest subject, Moslem or miscreant,
could claim with the general approval of the lieges, access and
appeal to the Caliph who, as Imám or Antistes of the Faith was
High President of a Court of Cassation.
Under wise administration Agriculture and Commerce, the twin
pillars of national prosperity, necessarily flourished. A
scientific canalisation, with irrigation works inherited from the
ancients, made the Mesopotamian Valley a rival of Kemi the Black
Land, and rendered cultivation a certainty of profit, not a mere
speculation, as it must ever be to those who perforce rely upon
the fickle rains of Heaven. The remains of extensive mines prove
that this source of public wealth was not neglected; navigation
laws encouraged transit and traffic; and ordinances for the
fisheries aimed at developing a branch of industry which is still
backward even during the xixth century. Most substantial
encouragement was given to trade and commerce, to manufactures
and handicrafts, by the flood of gold which poured in from all
parts of earth; by the presence of a splendid and luxurious
court, and by the call for new arts and industries which such a
civilisation would necessitate. The crafts were distributed into
guilds and syndicates under their respective chiefs, whom the
government did not "govern too much": these Shahbandars,
Mukaddams and Nakíbs regulated the several trades, rewarded the
industrious, punished the fraudulent and were personally
answerable, as we still see at Cairo, for the conduct of their
constituents. Public order, the sine quâ non of stability and
progress, was preserved, first, by the satisfaction of the lieges
who, despite their characteristic turbulence, had few if any
grievances; and, secondly, by a well directed and efficient
police, an engine of statecraft which in the West seems most
difficult to perfect. In the East, however, the Wali or Chief
Commissioner can reckon more or less upon the unsalaried
assistance of society: the cities are divided into quarters shut
off one from other by night, and every Moslem is expected, by his
law and religion, to keep watch upon his neighbours, to report
their delinquencies and, if necessary, himself to carry out the
penal code. But in difficult cases the guardians of the peace
were assisted by a body of private detectives, women as well as
men: these were called Tawwábún = the Penitents, because like our
Bow-street runners, they had given up an even less respectable
calling. Their adventures still delight the vulgar, as did the
Newgate Calendar of past generations; and to this class we owe
the Tales of Calamity Ahmad, Dalilah the Wily One, Saladin with
the Three Chiefs of Police (vol. iv. 271), and Al-Malik al-Záhir
with the Sixteen Constables (Bresl. Edit. xi. pp. 321- 99). Here
and in many other places we also see the origin of that
"picaresque" literature which arose in Spain and overran Europe;
and which begat Le Moyen de Parvenir. [FN#314]
I need say no more on this heading, the civilisation of Baghdad
contrasting with the barbarism of Europe then Germanic, The
Nights itself being the best expositor. On the other hand the
action of the state-religion upon the state, the condition of Al-
Islam during the reign of Al-Rashid, its declension from the
primitive creed and its relation to Christianity and Christendom,
require a somewhat extended notice. In offering the following
observations it is only fair to declare my standpoints.
1. All forms of "faith," that is, belief in things unseen, not
subject to the senses, and therefore unknown and (in our present
stage of development) unknowable, are temporary and transitory:
no religion hitherto promulgated amongst men shows any prospect
of being final or otherwise than finite.
2. Religious ideas, which are necessarily limited, may all be
traced home to the old seat of science and art, creeds and polity
in the Nile-Valley and to this day they retain the clearest signs
of their origin.
3. All so-called "revealed" religions consist mainly of three
portions, a cosmogony more or less mythical, a history more or
less falsified and a moral code more or less pure.
Al-Islam, it has been said, is essentially a fighting faith and
never shows to full advantage save in the field. The faith and
luxury of a wealthy capital, the debauchery and variety of vices
which would spring up therein, naturally as weeds in a rich
fallow, and the cosmopolitan views which suggest themselves in a
meeting-place of nations, were sore trials to the primitive
simplicity of the "Religion of Resignation"--the saving faith.
Harun and his cousin-wife, as has been shown, were orthodox and
even fanatical; but the Barmecides were strongly suspected of
heretical leanings; and while the many- headed showed itself, as
usual, violent, and ready to do battle about an Azan-call, the
learned, who sooner or later leaven the masses, were profoundly
dissatisfied with the dryness and barrenness of Mohammed's creed,
so acceptable to the vulgar, and were devising a series of
schisms and innovations.
In the Tale of Tawaddud (vol. v. 189) the reader has seen a
fairly extended catechism of the Creed (Dín), the ceremonial
observances (Mazhab) and the apostolic practices (Sunnat) of the
Shafi'í school which, with minor modifications, applies to the
other three orthodox. Europe has by this time clean forgotten
some tricks of her former bigotry, such as "Mawmet" (an idol!)
and "Mahommerie" (mummery[FN#315]), a place of Moslem worship:
educated men no longer speak with Ockley of the "great impostor
Mahomet," nor believe with the learned and violent Dr. Prideaux
that he was foolish and wicked enough to dispossess "certain poor
orphans, the sons of an inferior artificer" (the Banú Najjár!). A
host of books has attempted, though hardly with success, to
enlighten popular ignorance upon a crucial point; namely, that
the Founder of Al-Islam, like the Founder of Christianity, never
pretended to establish a new religion. His claims, indeed, were
limited to purging the "School of Nazareth" of the dross of ages
and of the manifold abuses with which long use had infected its
early constitution: hence to the unprejudiced observer his
reformation seems to have brought it nearer the primitive and
original doctrine than any subsequent attempts, especially the
Judaizing tendencies of the so-called "Protestant" churches. The
Meccan Apostle preached that the Hanafiyyah or orthodox belief,
which he subsequently named Al-Islam, was first taught by Allah,
in all its purity and perfection, to Adam and consigned to
certain inspired volumes now lost; and that this primal Holy Writ
received additions in the days of his descendants Shís (Seth) and
Idris (Enoch?), the founder of the Sabian (not "Sabæan") faith.
Here, therefore, Al-Islam at once avoided the deplorable
assumption of the Hebrews and the Christians,--an error which has
been so injurious to their science and their progress,--of
placing their "firstman" in circa B. C. 4000 or somewhat
subsequent to the building of the Pyramids: the Pre-
Adamite[FN#316] races and dynasties of the Moslems remove a great
stumbling-block and square with the anthropological views of the
present day. In process of time, when the Adamite religion
demanded a restoration and a supplement, its pristine virtue was
revived, restored and further developed by the books communicated
to Abraham, whose dispensation thus takes the place of the Hebrew
Noah and his Noachidæ. In due time the Torah, or Pentateuch,
superseded and abrogated the Abrahamic dispensation; the "Zabúr"
of David (a book not confined to the Psalms) reformed the Torah;
the Injíl or Evangel reformed the Zabur and was itself purified,
quickened and perfected by the Koran which means the
Reading or the Recital. Hence Locke, with many others, held
Moslems to be unorthodox, that is, anti-Trinitarian Christians
who believe in the Immaculate Conception, in the Ascension and in
the divine mission of Jesus; and when Priestley affirmed that
"Jesus was sent from God," all Moslems do the same. Thus they
are, in the main point of doctrine connected with the Deity,
simply Arians as opposed to Athanasians. History proves that the
former was the earlier faith which, though formally condemned in
A. D. 325 by Constantine's Council of Nice, [FN#317] overspread
the Orient beginning with Eastern Europe, where Ulphilas
converted the Goths; which extended into Africa with the Vandals,
claimed a victim or martyr as late as in the sixteenth century
[FN#318] and has by no means died out in this our day.
The Talmud had been completed a full century before Mohammed's
time and the Evangel had been translated into Arabic; moreover
travel and converse with his Jewish and Christian friends and
companions must have convinced the Meccan Apostle that
Christianity was calling as loudly for reform as Judaism had
done. [FN#319] An exaggerated Trinitarianism or rather Tritheism,
a "Fourth Person" and Saint-worship had virtually dethroned the
Deity; whilst Mariolatry had made the faith a religio muliebris,
and superstition had drawn from its horrid fecundity an
incredible number of heresies and monstrous absurdities. Even
ecclesiastic writers draw the gloomiest pictures of the Christian
Church in the fourth and seventh centuries, and one declares that
the "Kingdom of Heaven had become a Hell." Egypt, distracted by
the blood- thirsty religious wars of Copt and Greek, had been
covered with hermitages by a yens aeterna of semi-maniacal
superstition. Syria, ever "feracious of heresies," had allowed
many of her finest tracts to be monopolised by monkeries and
nunneries.[FN#320] After many a tentative measure Mohammed seems
to have built his edifice upon two bases, the unity of the
Godhead and the priesthood of the pater-familias. He abolished
for ever the "sacerdos alter Christus" whose existence, as some
one acutely said, is the best proof of Christianity, and whom all
know to be its weakest point. The Moslem family, however humble,
was to be the model in miniature of the State, and every father
in Al-Islam was made priest and pontiff in his own house, able
unaided to marry himself, to circumcise (to baptise as it were)
his children, to instruct them in the law and canonically to bury
himself (vol. viii. 22). Ritual, properly so called, there was
none; congregational prayers were merely those of the individual
en masse, and the only admitted approach to a sacerdotal order
were the Olema or scholars learned in the legistic and the Mullah
or schoolmaster. By thus abolishing the priesthood Mohammed
reconciled ancient with modern wisdom. "Scito dominum," said
Cato, "pro totâ familiâ rem divinam facere": "No priest at a
birth, no priest at a marriage, no priest at a death," is the
aspiration of the present Rationalistic School.
The Meccan Apostle wisely retained the compulsory sacrament of
circumcision and the ceremonial ablutions of the Mosaic law; and
the five daily prayers not only diverted man's thoughts from the
world but tended to keep his body pure. These two institutions
had been practiced throughout life by the Founder of
Christianity; but the followers who had never seen him, abolished
them for purposes evidently political and propagandist. By
ignoring the truth that cleanliness is next to godliness they
paved the way for such saints as Simon Stylites and Sabba who,
like the lowest Hindu orders of ascetics, made filth a
concominant and an evidence of piety: even now English Catholic
girls are at times forbidden by Italian priests a frequent use of
the bath as a sign post to the sin of "luxury." Mohammed would
have accepted the morals contained in the Sermon on the Mount
much more readily than did the Jews from whom its matter was
borrowed.[FN#321] He did something to abolish the use of wine,
which in the East means only its abuse; and he denounced games of
chance, well knowing that the excitable races of sub-tropical
climates cannot play with patience, fairness or moderation. He
set aside certain sums for charity to be paid by every Believer
and he was the first to establish a poor-rate (Zakát): thus he
avoided the shame and scandal of mendicancy which, beginning in
the Catholic countries of Southern Europe, extends to Syria and
as far East as Christianity is found. By these and other measures
of the same import he made the ideal Moslem's life physically
clean, moderate and temperace.
But Mohammed, the "master mind of the age," had, we must own, a
"genuine prophetic power, a sinking of self in the Divine not
distinguishable in kind from the inspiration of the Hebrew
prophets," especially in that puritanical and pharisaic
narrowness which, with characteristic simplicity, can see no good
outside its own petty pale. He had insight as well as outsight,
and the two taught him that personal and external reformation
were mean matters compared with elevating the inner man. In the
"purer Faith," which he was commissioned to abrogate and to
quicken, he found two vital defects equally fatal to its energy
and to its longevity. These were (and are) its egoism and its
degradation of humanity. Thus it cannot be a "pleroma": it needs
a Higher Law.[FN#322] As Judaism promised the good Jew all manner
of temporal blessings, issue, riches, wealth, honour, power,
length of days, so Christianity offered the good Christian, as a
bribe to lead a godly life, personal salvation and a future state
of happiness, in fact the Kingdom of Heaven, with an alternative
threat of Hell. It never rose to the height of the Hindu Brahmans
and Lao-Tse (the "Ancient Teacher"); of Zeno the Stoic and his
disciples the noble Pharisees[FN#323] who believed and preached
that Virtue is its own reward. It never dared to say, "Do good
for Good's sake;"[FN#324] even now it does not declare with
Cicero, "The sum of all is that what is right should be sought
for its own sake, because it is right, and not because it is
enacted." It does not even now venture to say with Philo Judæus,
"The good man seeks the day for the sake of the day, and the
light for the light's sake; and he labours to acquire what is
good for the sake of the good itself, and not of anything else."
So far for the egotism, naive and unconscious, of Christianity,
whose burden is, "Do good to escape Hell and gain Heaven."
A no less defect in the "School of Galilee" is its low view of
human nature. Adopting as sober and authentic history an Osirian-
Hebrew myth which Philo and a host of Rabbis explain away, each
after his own fashion, Christianity dwells, lovingly as it were,
upon the "Fall" of man[FN#325] and seems to revel in the
contemptible condition to which "original sin" condemned him;
thus grovelling before God ad majorem Dei gloriam. To such a
point was and is this carried that the Synod of Dort declared,
Infantes infidelium morientes in infantiâ reprobatos esse statui
mus; nay, many of the orthodox still hold a Christian babe dying
unbaptised to be unfit for a higher existence, and some have even
created a "limbo" expressly to domicile the innocents "of whom is
the kingdom of Heaven." Here, if any where, the cloven foot shows
itself and teaches us that the only solid stratum underlying
priestcraft is one composed of £ s. d.
And I never can now believe it, my Lord! (Bishop) we come to this
earth Ready damned, with the seeds of evil sown quite so thick at
our birth, sings Edwin Arnold.[FN#326] We ask, can infatuation or
hypocrisy--for it must be the one or the other--go farther? But
the Adamical myth is opposed to all our modern studies. The
deeper we dig into the Earth's "crust," the lower are the
specimens of human remains which occur; and hitherto not a single
"find" has come to revive the faded glories of
Adam the goodliest man of men since born (!)
His sons, the fairest of her daughters Eve.
Thus Christianity, admitting, like Judaism, its own saints and
santons, utterly ignores the progress of humanity, perhaps the
only belief in which the wise man can take unmingled
satisfaction. Both have proposed an originally perfect being with
hyacinthine locks, from whose type all the subsequent humans are
degradations physical and moral. We on the other hand hold, from
the evidence of our senses, that early man was a savage very
little superior to the brute; that during man's millions of years
upon earth there has been a gradual advance towards perfection,
at times irregular and even retrograde, but in the main
progressive; and that a comparison of man in the xixth century
with the caveman[FN#327] affords us the means of measuring past
progress and of calculating the future of humanity.
Mahommed was far from rising to the moral heights of the ancient
sages: he did nothing to abate the egotism of Christianity; he
even exaggerated the pleasures of its Heaven and the horrors of
its Hell. On the other hand he did much to exalt human nature. He
passed over the "Fall" with a light hand; he made man superior to
the angels; he encouraged his fellow creatures to be great and
good by dwelling upon their nobler not their meaner side; he
acknowledged, even in this world, the perfectability of mankind,
including womankind, and in proposing the loftiest ideal he acted
unconsciously upon the grand dictum of chivalry--Honneur
oblige.[FN#328] His prophets were mostly faultless men; and, if
the "Pure of Allah" sinned, he "sinned against himself." Lastly,
he made Allah predetermine the career and fortunes, not only of
empires, but of every created being; thus inculcating sympathy
and tolerance of others, which is true humanity, and a proud
resignation to evil as to good fortune. This is the doctrine
which teaches the vulgar Moslem a dignity observed even by the
"blind traveller," and which enables him to display a moderation,
a fortitude, and a self-command rare enough amongst the followers
of the "purer creed."
Christian historians explain variously the portentous rise of Al-
Islam and its marvellous spread over vast regions, not only of
pagans and idolators but of Christians. Prideaux disingenuously
suggests that it "seems to have been purposely raised up by God,
to be a scourge to the Christian Church for not living in
accordance with their most holy religion." The popular excuse is
by the free use of the sword; this, however, is mere ignorance:
in Mohammed's day and early Al-Islam only actual fighters were
slain:[FN#329] the rest were allowed to pay the Jizyah, or
capitation-tax, and to become tributaries, enjoying almost all
the privileges of Moslems. But even had forcible conversion been
most systematically practiced, it would have afforded an
insufficient explanation of the phenomenal rise of an empire
which covered more ground in eighty years than Rome had gained in
eight hundred. During so short a time the grand revival of
Monotheism had consolidated into a mighty nation, despite their
eternal blood-feuds, the scattered Arab tribes; a six-years'
campaign had conquered Syria, and a lustre or two utterly
overthrew Persia, humbled the Græco-Roman, subdued Egypt and
extended the Faith along northern Africa as far as the Atlantic.
Within three generations the Copts of Nile-land had formally cast
out Christianity, and the same was the case with Syria, the
cradle of the Nazarene, and Mesopotamia, one of his strongholds,
although both were backed by all the remaining power of the
Byzantine empire. Northwestern Africa, which had rejected the
idolatro-philosophic system of pagan and imperial Rome, and had
accepted, after lukewarm fashion, the Arian Christianity imported
by the Vandals, and the "Nicene mystery of the Trinity," hailed
with enthusiasm the doctrines of the Koran and has never ceased
to be most zealous in its Islam. And while Mohammedanism speedily
reduced the limits of Christendom by one-third, while through-out
the Arabian, Saracenic and Turkish invasions whole Christian
peoples embraced the monotheistic faith, there are hardly any
instances of defection from the new creed and, with the exception
of Spain and Sicily, it has never been suppressed in any land
where once it took root. Even now, when Mohammedanism no longer
wields the sword, it is spreading over wide regions in China, in
the Indian Archipelago, and especially in Western and Central
Africa, propagated only by self-educated individuals, trading
travellers, while Christianity makes no progress and cannot exist
on the Dark Continent without strong support from Government. Nor
can we explain this honourable reception by the "licentiousness"
ignorantly attributed to Al-Islam, one of the most severely moral
of institutions; or by the allurements of polygamy and
concubinage, slavery,[FN#330] and a "wholly sensual Paradise"
devoted to eating, drinking[FN#331] and the pleasures of the
sixth sense. The true and simple explanation is that this grand
Reformation of Christianity was urgently wanted when it appeared,
that it suited the people better than the creed which it
superseded and that it has not ceased to be sufficient for their
requirements, social, sexual and vital. As the practical
Orientalist, Dr. Leitner, well observes from his own experience,
"The Mohammedan religion can adapt itself better than any other
and has adapted itself to circumstances and to the needs of the
various races which profess it, in accordance with the spirit of
the age."[FN#332] Hence, I add, its wide diffusion and its
impregnable position. "The dead hand, stiff and motionless," is a
forcible simile for the present condition of Al-Islam; but it
results from limited and imperfect observation and it fails in
the sine quâ non of similes and metaphors, a foundation of fact.
I cannot quit this subject without a passing reference to an
admirably written passage in Mr. Palgrave's travels[FN#333] which
is essentially unfair to Al-Islam. The author has had ample
opportunities of comparing creeds: of Jewish blood and born a
Protestant, he became a Catholic and a Jesuit (Père Michel
Cohen)[FN#334] in a Syrian convent; he crossed Arabia as a good
Moslem and he finally returned to his premier amour, Anglicanism.
But his picturesque depreciation of Mohammedanism, which has
found due appreciation in more than one popular volume, [FN#335]
is a notable specimen of special pleading, of the ad captandum in
its modern and least honest form. The writer begins by assuming
the arid and barren Wahhabi-ism, which he had personally studied,
as a fair expression of the Saving Faith. What should we say to a
Moslem traveller who would make the Calvinism of the sourest
Covenanter, model, genuine and ancient Christianity? What would
sensible Moslems say to these propositions of Professor Maccovius
and the Synod of Dort:--Good works are an obstacle to salvation.
God does by no means will the salvation of all men: he does will
sin and he destines men to sin, as sin? What would they think of
the Inadmissible Grace, the Perseverance of the Elect, the
Supralapsarian and the Sublapsarian and, finally, of a Deity the
author of man's existence, temptation and fall, who deliberately
pre-ordains sin and ruin? "Father Cohen" carries out into the
regions of the extreme his strictures on the one grand vitalising
idea of Al-Islam, "There is no god but God;"[FN#336] and his
deduction concerning the Pantheism of Force sounds unreal and
unsound, compared with the sensible remarks upon the same subject
by Dr. Badgers[FN#337] who sees the abstruseness of the doctrine
and does not care to include it in hard and fast lines or to
subject it to mere logical analysis. Upon the subject of
"predestination" Mr. Palgrave quotes, not from the Koran, but
from the Ahádís or Traditional Sayings of the Apostle; but what
importance attaches to a legend in the Mischnah, or Oral Law, of
the Hebrews utterly ignored by the Written Law? He joins the many
in complaining that even the mention of "the love of God" is
absent from Mohammed's theology, burking the fact that it never
occurs in the Jewish scriptures and that the genius of Arabic,
like Hebrew, does not admit the expression: worse still, he keeps
from his reader such Koranic passages as, to quote no other,
"Allah loveth you and will forgive your sins" (iii. 29). He
pities Allah for having "no son, companion or counsellor" and, of
course, he must equally commiserate Jehovah. Finally his views of
the lifelessness of Al-Islam are directly opposed to the opinions
of Dr. Leitner and the experience of all who have lived in Moslem
lands. Such are the ingenious but not ingenuous distortions of
fact, the fine instances of the pathetic fallacy, and the
noteworthy illustrations of the falsehood of extremes, which have
engendered "Mohammedanism a Relapse: the worst form of
Monotheism,"[FN#338] and which have been eagerly seized upon and
further deformed by the authors of popular books, that is,
volumes written by those who know little for those who know less.
In Al-Rashid's day a mighty change had passed over the primitive
simplicity of Al-Islam, the change to which faiths and creeds,
like races and empires and all things sublunary, are subject. The
proximity of Persia and the close intercourse with the Græco-
Romans had polished and greatly modified the physiognomy of the
rugged old belief: all manner of metaphysical subtleties had
cropped up, with the usual disintegrating effect, and some of
these threatened even the unity of the Godhead. Musaylimah and
Karmat had left traces of their handiwork: the Mutazilites
(separatists or secessors) actively propagated their doctrine of
a created and temporal Koran. The Khárijí or Ibázi, who rejects
and reviles Abú Turáb (Caliph Ali), contended passionately with
the Shí'ah who reviles and rejects the other three "Successors;"
and these sectarians, favoured by the learned, and by the
Abbasides in their jealous hatred of the Ommiades, went to the
extreme length of the Ali-Iláhi--the God-makers of Ali--whilst
the Dahrí and the Zindík, the Mundanist and the Agnoetic,
proposed to sweep away the whole edifice. The neo-Platonism and
Gnosticism which had not essentially affected
Christendom,[FN#339] found in Al-Islam a rich fallow and gained
strength and luxuriance by the solid materialism and conservatism
of its basis. Such were a few of the distracting and resolving
influences which Time had brought to bear upon the True Believer
and which, after some half a dozen generations, had separated the
several schisms by a wider breach than that which yawns between
Orthodox, Romanist and Lutheran. Nor was this scandal in Al-Islam
abated until the Tartar sword applied to it the sharpest remedy.
B.--Woman.
The next point I propose to consider is the position of womanhood
in The Nights, so curiously at variance with the stock ideas
concerning the Moslem home and domestic policy still prevalent,
not only in England, but throughout Europe. Many readers of these
volumes have remarked to me with much astonishment that they find
the female characters more remarkable for decision, action and
manliness than the male; and are wonderstruck by their masterful
attitude and by the supreme influence they exercise upon public
and private life.
I have glanced at the subject of the sex in Al-Islam to such an
extent throughout my notes that little remains here to be added.
Women, all the world over are what men make them; and the main
charm of Amazonian fiction is to see how they live and move and
have their being without any masculine guidance. But it is the
old ever-new fable
"Who drew the Lion vanquished? 'Twas a man!''
The books of the Ancients, written in that stage of civilisation
when the sexes are at civil war, make women even more than in
real life the creatures of their masters: hence from the dawn of
literature to the present day the sex has been the subject of
disappointed abuse and eulogy almost as unmerited. Ecclesiastes,
perhaps the strangest specimen of an "inspired volume" the world
has yet produced, boldly declares "One (upright) man among a
thousand I have found; but a woman among all have I not found"
(vol. vii. 28), thus confirming the pessimism of Petronius:--
Femina nulla bona est, et si bona contigit ulla
Nescio quo fato res male facta bona est.
In the Psalms again (xxx. 15) we have the old sneer at the three
insatiables, Hell, Earth and the Parts feminine (os vulvæ); and
Rabbinical learning has embroidered these and other texts,
producing a truly hideous caricature. A Hadis attributed to
Mohammed runs, "They (women) lack wits and faith. When Eve was
created Satan rejoiced saying:--Thou art half of my host, the
trustee of my secret and my shaft wherewith I shoot and miss
not!" Another tells us, "I stood at the gate of Heaven, and lo!
most of its inmates were poor, and I stood at the gate of Hell,
and lo! most of its inmates were women.''[FN#340] "Take care of
the glass-phials!" cried the Prophet to a camel-guide singing
with a sweet voice. Yet the Meccan Apostle made, as has been
seen, his own household produce two perfections. The blatant
popular voice follows with such "dictes" as, "Women are made of
nectar and poison"; "Women have long hair and short wits" and so
forth. Nor are the Hindus behindhand. Woman has fickleness
implanted in her by Nature like the flashings of lightning (Kathá
s.s. i. 147); she is valueless as a straw to the heroic mind
(169); she is hard as adamant in sin and soft as flour in fear
(170) and, like the fly, she quits camphor to settle on compost
(ii. I7). "What dependence is there in the crowing of a hen?"
(women's opinions) says the Hindi proverb; also "A virgin with
grey hairs!" (i.e. a monster) and, "Wherever wendeth a fairy face
a devil wendeth with her." The same superficial view of holding
woman to be lesser (and very inferior) man is taken generally by
the classics; and Euripides distinguished himself by misogyny,
although he drew the beautiful character of Alcestis. Simonides,
more merciful than Ecclesiastes, after naming his swine-women,
dog-women, cat-women, etc., ends the decade with the admirable
bee-woman, thus making ten per cent. honest. In mediæval or
Germanic Europe the doctrine of the Virgin mother gave the sex a
status unknown to the Ancients except in Egypt, where Isis was
the help-mate and completion of Osiris, in modern parlance "The
Woman clothed with the Sun." The kindly and courtly Palmerin of
England, in whose pages "gentlemen may find their choice of sweet
inventions and gentlewomen be satisfied with courtly
expectations," suddenly blurts out, "But in truth women are never
satisfied by reason, being governed by accident or appetite"
(chaps. xlix).
The Nights, as might be expected from the emotional East,
exaggerate these views. Women are mostly "Sectaries of the god
Wünsch"; beings of impulse, blown about by every gust of passion;
stable only in instability; constant only in inconstancy. The
false ascetic, the perfidious and murderous crone and the old
hag-procuress who pimps like Umm Kulsum,[FN#341] for mere
pleasure, in the luxury of sin, are drawn with an experienced and
loving hand. Yet not the less do we meet with examples of the
dutiful daughter, the model lover matronly in her affection, the
devoted wife, the perfect mother, the saintly devotee, the
learned preacher, Univira the chaste widow and the
self-sacrificing heroic woman. If we find (vol. iii. 216) the sex
described as:--
An offal cast by kites where'er they list,
and the studied insults of vol. iii. 318, we also come upon an
admirable sketch of conjugal happiness (vol. vii. ? 43); and, to
mention no other, Shahryar's attestation to Shahrazad's
excellence in the last charming pages of The Nights.[FN#342] It
is the same with the Kathá whose praise and dispraise are equally
enthusiastic; e.g., "Women of good family are guarded by their
virtue, the sole efficient chamberlain; but the Lord himself can
hardly guard the unchaste. Who can stem a furious stream and a
frantic woman?" (i. 328). "Excessive love in woman is your only
hero for daring" (i. 339). "Thus fair ones, naturally feeble,
bring about a series of evil actions which engender discernment
and aversion to the world; but here and there you will find a
virtuous woman who adorneth a glorious house as the streak of the
moon arrayeth the breadth of the Heavens" (i. 346). "So you see,
King, honourable matrons are devoted to their husbands and 'tis
not the case that women are always bad" (ii. 624). And there is
true wisdom in that even balance of feminine qualities advocated
by our Hindu-Hindi class-book the Toti-námeh or Parrot volume.
The perfect woman has seven requisites. She must not always be
merry (1) nor sad (2); she must not always be talking (3) nor
silently musing (4); she must not always be adorning herself (5)
nor neglecting her person (6); and, (7) at all times she must be
moderate and self possessed.
The legal status of womankind in Al-Islam is exceptionally high,
a fact of which Europe has often been assured, although the truth
has not even yet penetrated into the popular brain. Nearly a
century ago one Mirza Abú Tálib Khán, an Amildár or revenue
collector, after living two years in London, wrote an "apology"
for, or rather a vindication of, his countrywomen which is still
worth reading and quoting.[FN#343] Nations are but superficial
judges of one another: where customs differ they often remark
only the salient distinctive points which, when examined, prove
to be of minor importance. Europeans seeing and hearing that
women in the East are "cloistered" as the Grecian matron was wont
and ; that wives may not walk out with
their husbands and cannot accompany them to "balls and parties";
moreover, that they are always liable, like the ancient Hebrew,
to the mortification of the "sister-wife," have most ignorantly
determined that they are mere serviles and that their lives are
not worth living. Indeed, a learned lady, Miss Martineau, once
visiting a Harem went into ecstasies of pity and sorrow because
the poor things knew nothing of--say trigonometry and the use of
the globes. Sonnini thought otherwise, and my experience, like
that of all old dwellers in the East, is directly opposed to this
conclusion.
I have noted (Night cmlxii.) that Mohammed, in the fifth year of
his reign,[FN#344] after his ill-advised and scandalous
marriage[FN#345] with his foster-daughter Zaynab, established the
Hijáb or veiling of women. It was probably an exaggeration of
local usage: a modified separation of the sexes, which extended
and still extends even to the Badawi, must long have been
customary in Arabian cities, and its object was to deliver the
sexes from temptation, as the Koran says (xxxii. 32), "purer will
this (practice) be for your hearts and their hearts."[FN#346] The
women, who delight in restrictions which tend to their honour,
accepted it willingly and still affect it, they do not desire a
liberty or rather a licence which they have learned to regard as
inconsistent with their time-honoured notions of feminine decorum
and delicacy, and they would think very meanly of a husband who
permitted them to be exposed, like hetairæ, to the public
gaze.[FN#347] As Zubayr Pasha, exiled to Gibraltar for another's
treason, said to my friend, Colonel Buckle, after visiting
quarters evidently laid out by a jealous husband, "We Arabs think
that when a man has a precious jewel, 'tis wiser to lock it up in
a box than to leave it about for anyone to take." The Eastern
adopts the instinctive, the Western prefers the rational method.
The former jealously guards his treasure, surrounds it with all
precautions, fends off from it all risks and if the treasure go
astray, kills it. The latter, after placing it en evidence upon
an eminence in ball dress with back and bosom bared to the gaze
of society, a bundle of charms exposed to every possible
seduction, allows it to take its own way, and if it be misled, he
kills or tries to kill the misleader. It is a fiery trial and the
few who safely pass through it may claim a higher standpoint in
the moral world than those who have never been sorely tried. But
the crucial question is whether Christian Europe has done wisely
in offering such temptations.
The second and main objection to Moslem custom is the
marriage-system which begins with a girl being wedded to a man
whom she knows only by hearsay. This was the habit of our
forbears not many generations ago, and it still prevails amongst
noble houses in Southern Europe, where a lengthened study of it
leaves me doubtful whether the "love-marriage," as it is called,
or wedlock with an utter stranger, evidently the two extremes, is
likely to prove the happier. The "sister-wife" is or would be a
sore trial to monogamic races like those of Northern Europe where
Caia, all but the equal of Caius in most points mental and
physical and superior in some, not unfrequently proves herself
the "man of the family," the "only man in the boat." But in the
East, where the sex is far more delicate, where a girl is brought
up in polygamy, where religious reasons separate her from her
husband, during pregnancy and lactation, for three successive
years; and where often enough like the Mormon damsel she would
hesitate to "nigger it with a one-wife-man," the case assumes a
very different aspect and the load, if burden it be, falls
comparatively light. Lastly, the "patriarchal household" is
mostly confined to the grandee and the richard, whilst Holy Law
and public opinion, neither of which can openly be disregarded,
assign command of the household to the equal or first wife and
jealously guard the rights and privileges of the others.
Mirza Abu Talib "the Persian Prince"[FN#348] offers six reasons
why "the liberty of the Asiatic women appears less than that of
the Europeans," ending with,
I'll fondly place on either eye
The man that can to this reply.
He then lays down eight points in which the Moslem wife has
greatly the advantage over her Christian sisterhood; and we may
take his first as a specimen. Custom, not contrary to law,
invests the Mohammedan mother with despotic government of the
homestead, slaves, servants and children, especially the latter:
she alone directs their early education, their choice of faith,
their marriage and their establishment in life; and in case of
divorce she takes the daughters, the sons going to the sire. She
has also liberty to leave her home, not only for one or two
nights, but for a week or a fortnight, without consulting her
husband; and whilst she visits a strange household, the master
and all males above fifteen are forbidden the Harem. But the main
point in favour of the Moslem wife is her being a "legal sharer":
inheritance is secured to her by Koranic law; she must be dowered
by the bridegroom to legalise marriage and all she gains is
secured to her; whereas in England a "Married Woman's Property
Act" was completed only in 1882 after many centuries of the
grossest abuses.
Lastly, Moslems and Easterns in general study and intelligently
study the art and mystery of satisfying the physical woman. In my
Foreword I have noticed among barbarians the system of "making
men,"[FN#349] that is, of teaching lads first arrived at puberty
the nice conduct of the instrumentum paratum plantandis avibus: a
branch of the knowledge-tree which our modern education grossly
neglects, thereby entailing untold miseries upon individuals,
families and generations. The mock virtue, the most immodest
modesty of England and of the United States in the xixth century,
pronounces the subject foul and fulsome:"Society" sickens at all
details; and hence it is said abroad that the English have the
finest women in Europe and least know how to use them. Throughout
the East such studies are aided by a long series of volumes, many
of them written by learned physiologists, by men of social
standing and by religious dignitaries high in office. The
Egyptians especially delight in aphrodisiac literature treating,
as the Turks say, de la partie au-dessous de la taille; and from
fifteen hundred to two thousand copies of a new work, usually
lithographed in cheap form, readily sell off. The pudibund Lane
makes allusion to and quotes (A. N. i. 216) one of the most out
spoken, a 4to of 464 pages, called the Halbat al-Kumayt or "Race-
Course of the Bay Horse," a poetical and horsey term for grape-
wine. Attributed by D'Herbelot to the Kazi Shams al-Din Mohammed,
it is wholly upon the subject of wassail and women till the last
few pages, when his reverence exclaims:--"This much, O reader, I
have recounted, the better thou mayst know what to avoid;" and so
forth, ending with condemning all he had praised.[FN#350] Even
the divine and historian Jalál al-Dín al-Siyuti is credited with
having written, though the authorship is much disputed, a work
entitled, "Kitáb al-Ízáh fi 'ilm al-Nikáh" =The Book of
Exposition in the Science of Coition: my copy, a lithograph of 33
pages, undated, but evidently Cairene, begins with exclaiming
"Alhamdolillah--Laud to the Lord who adorned the virginal bosom
with breasts and who made the thighs of women anvils for the
spear handles of men!" To the same amiable theologian are also
ascribed the "Kitáb Nawázir al-Ayk fi al-Nayk" = Green Splendours
of the Copse in Copulation, an abstract of the "Kitáb al-Wisháh
fí fawáid al-Nikáh" = Book of the Zone on Coition-boon. Of the
abundance of pornographic literature we may judge from a list of
the following seven works given in the second page of the "Kitáb
Rujú'a al-Shaykh ila Sabáh fi 'l-Kuwwat al-Báh[FN#351]" = Book of
Age-rejuvenescence in the power of Concupiscence: it is the work
of Ahmad bin Sulayman, surnamed Ibn Kamál Pasha.
1. Kitáb al-Báh by Al-Nahli.
2. Kitáb al'-Ars wa al'-Aráis (Book of the Bridal and the
Brides) by Al-Jáhiz.
3. Kitáb al-Kiyán (Maiden's Book) by Ibn Hájib al-Nu'mán.
4. Kitáb al-Ízáh fí asrár al-Nikáh (Book of the Exposition on
the Mysteries of married Fruition).
5. Kitáb Jámi' al-Lizzah (The Compendium of Pleasure) by Ibn
Samsamáni.
6. Kitáb Barján (Yarján?) wa Janáhib (? ?)[FN#352]
7. Kitáb al-Munákahah wa al-Mufátahah fí Asnáf al-Jimá' wa
Álátih (Book of Carnal Copulation and the Initiation into the
modes of Coition and its Instrumentation) by Aziz al-Din
al-Masíhí.[FN#353]
To these I may add the Lizzat al-Nisá (Pleasures of Women), a
text-book in Arabic, Persian and Hindostani: it is a translation
and a very poor attempt, omitting much from, and adding naught
to, the famous Sanskrit work Ananga-Ranga (Stage of the Bodiless
One i.e. Cupido) or Hindu Art of Love (Ars Amoris
Indica).[FN#354] I have copies of it in Sanskrit and
Maráthi,Guzrati and Hindostani: the latter is an unpaged 8vo of
pp. 66, including eight pages of most grotesque illustrations
showing the various san (the Figuræ Veneris or positions of
copulation), which seem to be the triumphs of contortionists.
These pamphlets lithographed in Bombay are broad cast over the
land.[FN#355]
It must not be supposed that such literature is purely and simply
aphrodisiacal. The learned Sprenger, a physician as well as an
Arabist, says (Al-Mas'údi p. 384) of a tractate by the celebrated
Rhazes in the Leyden Library, "The number of curious
observations, the correct and practical ideas and the novelty of
the notions of Eastern nations on these subjects, which are
contained in this book, render it one of the most important
productions of the medical literature of the Arabs." I can
conscientiously recommend to the Anthropologist a study of the
"Kutub al-Báh."
C.--Pornography.
Here it will be advisable to supplement what was said in my
Foreword (p. xiii.) concerning the turpiloquium of The Nights.
Readers who have perused the ten volumes will probably agree with
me that the naïve indecencies of the text are rather gaudis-serie
than prurience; and, when delivered with mirth and humour, they
are rather the "excrements of wit" than designed for debauching
the mind. Crude and indelicate with infantile plainness; even
gross and, at times, "nasty" in their terrible frankness, they
cannot be accused of corrupting suggestiveness or subtle
insinuation of vicious sentiment. Theirs is a coarseness of
language, not of idea; they are indecent, not depraved; and the
pure and perfect naturalness of their nudity seems almost to
purify it, showing that the matter is rather of manners than of
morals. Such throughout the East is the language of every man,
woman and child, from prince to peasant, from matron to
prostitute: all are as the naïve French traveller said of the
Japanese: "si grossiers qu'ils ne sçavent nommer les choses que
par leur nom." This primitive stage of language sufficed to draw
from Lane and Burckhardt strictures upon the "most immodest
freedom of conversation in Egypt," where, as all the world over,
there are three several stages for names of things and acts
sensual. First we have the mot cru, the popular term, soon
followed by the technical and scientific, and, lastly, the
literary or figurative nomenclature, which is often much more
immoral because more attractive, suggestive and seductive than
the "raw word." And let me observe that the highest civilisation
is now returning to the language of nature. In La Glu of M. J.
Richepin, a triumph of the realistic school, we find such
"archaic" expressions as la petée, putain, foutue à la six-
quatre-dix; un facétieuse pétarade; tu t'es foutue de, etc. Eh
vilain bougre! and so forth.[FN#356] To those critics who
complain of these raw vulgarisms and puerile indecencies in The
Nights I can reply only by quoting the words said to have been
said by Dr. Johnson to the lady who complained of the naughty
words in his dictionary--"You must have been looking for them,
Madam!"
But I repeat (p. xiv.) there is another element in The Nights and
that is one of absolute obscenity utterly repugnant to English
readers, even the least prudish. It is chiefly connected with
what our neighbours call le vice contre nature--as if anything
can be contrary to nature which includes all things.[FN#357] Upon
this subject I must offer details, as it does not enter into my
plan to ignore any theme which is interesting to the Orientalist
and the Anthropologist. And they, methinks, do abundant harm who,
for shame or disgust, would suppress the very mention of such
matters: in order to combat a great and growing evil deadly to
the birth-rate--the mainstay of national prosperity--the first
requisite is careful study. As Albert Bollstoedt, Bishop of
Ratisbon, rightly says.--Quia malum non evitatum nisi cognitum,
ideo necesse est cognoscere immundiciem coitus et multa alla quæ
docentur in isto libro. Equally true are Professor Mantegazza's
words:[FN#358] Cacher les plates du cœur humain au nom de la
pudeur, ce n'est au contraire qu'hypocrisie ou peur. The late Mr.
Grote had reason to lament that when describing such institutions
as the far-famed of Thebes, the Sacred Band
annihilated at Chaeroneia, he was compelled to a reticence which
permitted him to touch only the surface of the subject. This was
inevitable under the present rule of Cant[FN#359] in a book
intended for the public: but the same does not apply to my
version of The Nights, and now I proceed to discuss the matter
sérieusement, honnêtement, historiquement; to show it in decent
nudity not in suggestive fig-leaf or feuille de vigne.
D.--Pederasty.
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
Karáchi, a townlet of some two thousand souls and distant not
more than a mile from camp, supported no less than three lupanars
or borders, in which not women but boys and eunuchs, the former
demanding nearly a double price,[FN#360] 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[FN#361] 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[FN#362] 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.
Subsequent enquiries in many and distant countries enabled me to
arrive at the following conclusions:--
1. 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.
2. Running eastward the Sotadic Zone narrows, embracing Asia
Minor, Mesopotamia and Chaldæa, Afghanistan, Sind, the Punjab and
Kashmir.
3. In Indo-China the belt begins to broaden, enfolding China,
Japan and Turkistan.
4. 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.
5. 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 practice 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;[FN#363] 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,[FN#364] Queen of Frictrices or Rubbers.[FN#365]
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) Peripheric or anatomical,
caused by an unusual distribution of the nerves and their
hyperæsthesia; (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.[FN#366]
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 cachetic 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 met einen Thick." 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 generic; 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, "Étude Medico-régale 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
it is a medical question 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,[FN#367] Rosenbaum[FN#368] and M. H. E. Meier.[FN#369] 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
Fœmineam venerem;--
Ille etiam Thracum populis fuit auctor, amorem
In teneres transferre mares: citraque juventam
Ætatis breve ver, et primos carpere flores.
Ovid Met. x. 79-85.
Euripides proposed Laïus father of Oedipus as the inaugurator,
whereas Timæus 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 archæologist 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.)[FN#370] asserts with much more probability that the
Persians used eunuch boys according to the Mos Græciæ, long
before they had seen the Grecian main.
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,
especially his 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 ({Greek}) by the lover ({Greek}); of
the obligations of the ravisher ({Greek}) to the favourite
({Greek})[FN#371] and of the "marriage-ceremonies" which lasted
two months. See also Plato, Laws i. c. 8. Servius (Ad Æneid. x.
325) informs us "De Cretensibus accepimus, quod in amore puerorum
intemperantes fuerunt, quod postea in Lacones et in totam Græciam
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;[FN#372] 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 ({Greek}) lust. They both approved of pure
pederastía, 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: Phædrus; Repub.
vi. c. I9 and Xenophon, Synop. iv. 10), e.g., "There was once a
boy, or rather a youth, of exceeding beauty and he had very many
lovers"--this is the language of Hafiz and Sa'adi. Æschylus,
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
Alcæus, 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[FN#373] and others;
Empedocles, Pausanias; Epicurus, Pytocles; Aristippus, Eutichydes
and Zeno with his Stoics had a philosophic disregard for women,
affecting only pederastía. A man in Athenæus (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
pæderasta"[FN#374] being violemment soupçonné when under the
mantle:--non semper sine plagâ ab eo surrexit. Athenæus (v. c.
I3) declares that Plato represents Socrates as absolutely
intoxicated with his passion for Alcibiades.[FN#375] The Ancients
seem to have held the connection impure, or Juvenal would not
have written:--
Inter Socraticos notissima fossa cinædos,
followed by Firmicus (vii. 14) who speaks of "Socratici
pædicones." 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.
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 ''Lacedæmonius"
for a pathic and other writers apply it to a tribade. After the
Peloponnesian War, which ended in B.C. 404, the use became merged
in the abuse. Yet some purity must have survived, even amongst
the Bœotians who produced the famous Narcissus,[FN#376] described
by Ovid (Met. iii. 339);--
Multi ilium juvenes, multæ cupiere puellæ;
Nulli ilium juvenes, nullæ tetigere puellæ:[FN#377]
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 redactions on the fatal field of
Chaeroneia form their fittest epitaph. At last the Athenians,
according to Æschines, officially punished Sodomy with death; but
the threat did not abolish bordels of boys, like those of
Karáchi; 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 (Æsch. contra Tim.);
and paid a fixed tax to the state. The pleasures of society in
civilised Greece seem to have been sought chiefly in the heresies
of love--Hetairesis[FN#378] and Sotadism.
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 quotation.
To live the life of Abron (the Argive), i.e. that of a ,
pathic or passive lover.
The Agathonian song.
Aischrourgía = dishonest love, also called Akolasía, Akrasía,
Arrenokoitía, etc.
Alcinoan youths, or "non conformists,"
In cute curandâ plus æquo operate 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 badízein = clunes torquens: also Bátalos= a catamite.
Catapygos, Katapygosyne = puerarius and catadactylium from
Dactylion, the ring, used in the sense of Nerissa's, but applied
to the corollarium puerile.
Cinædus (Kínaidos), the active lover ({Greek}) derived either
from his kinetics or quasi {Greek} = dog modest. Also
Spatalocinædus (lasciviâ fluens) = a fair Ganymede.
Chalcidissare (Khalkidizein), from Chalcis in Eubœa, a city famed
for love à 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.
Mokhthería, depravity with boys.
Paidika, whence pædicare (act.) and pædicari (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 ({Greek})= cunnilingere in tempore menstruum, quia
hoc vitium in Phœnicia generate solebat (Thes. Erot. Ling.
Latinæ); 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 ({Greek}, from Siphnos, hod. Sifanto Island) =
digito podicem fodere ad pruriginem restinguendam, says Erasmus
(see Mirabeau's Erotika Biblion, Anoscopie).
Thrypsis = the rubbing.
Pederastía 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 fœminarum 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 (B.C. 226?), 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 païs de chrétienté, says Bayle under
"Anacreon." The great Cæsar, the Cinaedus calvus of Catullus, was
the husband of all the wives and the wife of all the husbands in
Rome (Suetonius, cap. Iii.); and his soldiers sang in his praise,
Gallias Cæsar, subegit, Nicomedes Cæsarem (Suet. cies. xlix.);
whence his sobriquet "Fornix Birthynicus." Of Augustus the people
chaunted
Videsne ut Cinædus orbem digito temperet?
Tiberius, with his pisciculi and greges exoletorum, invented the
Symplegma or nexus of Sellarii, agentes et patientes, in which
the spinthriæ (lit. women's bracelets) were connected in a chain
by the bond of flesh[FN#379] (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. I),
Tres uno in lecto: stuprum duo perpetiuntur;
And Martial had said (xii. 43)
Quo symplegmate quinque copulentur;
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.
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. Debauchées had signals
like freemasons whereby they recognised one another. The Greek
Skematízein 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"[FN#380] of Rabelais and the
Chiromantists. Another sign was to scratch the head with the
minimus--digitulo caput scabere Juv. ix. 133).[FN#381] 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
animæ.
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[FN#382]
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 every one 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?"
Erotic Latin glossaries[FN#383] give some ninety words connected
with pederasty and some, which "speak with Roman simplicity," are
peculiarly expressive. "Averse 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. 7I). The Divisor is so called from his practice Hillas
dividere or cædere, something like Martial's cacare mentulam or
Juvenal's Hesternæ occurrere cænæ. 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 pædicatione. Illicita libido is =
præpostera 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,
scarabæus and smerdalius explain themselves.
From Rome the practice extended far and wide to her colonies,
especially the Provincia now called Provence. Athenæus (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 civilisation 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
Marocco,[FN#384] 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
licence: in one case the English wife failed to banish from the
home "that horrid boy."
Yet pederasty is forbidden 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.
I60-I74 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 judgment 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.[FN#385] 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 Ghilmán or Wuldán, the beautiful boys of
Paradise, the counter parts 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 debauchées refer to it, the learned look upon
the assertion as scandalous.
As in Marocco 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 (B.C. 524), 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.[FN#386] Nor
would the evil be diminished by the Hellenes who, under Alexander
the Great, "liberator and saviour of Egypt" (B.C. 332),
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 (chaps. xv.), which formed the "delight
of the Egyptians." During the Napoleonic conquest Jaubert in his
letter to General Bruix (p. I9) 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 high-dried 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.
Syria and Palestine, another ancient focus of abominations,
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.[FN#387] 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 Pirmicus relates that "The Assyrians and part of the
Africians" (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 practiced as a
religious rite by the Tympanotribas or Gallus,[FN#388] 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,[FN#389] could
not altogether cast out the old possession. Here 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 sacrifice 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
limina, Isiacæ sacraria Lunæ) were centres of sodomy, and the
religious practice was adopted by the grand priestly castes from
Mesopotamia to Mexico and Peru.
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 judgment 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."[FN#390] 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 mineralised 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 resembring
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 Moseidæ, was doubtless to discountenance a
perversion prejudicial to the increase of population. And he
speaks with no uncertain voice, Whoso lieth with a beast shall
surely be put to death (Exod. xxii. I9): 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 v.v. 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).
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;[FN#391]
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 practicing 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.
The Hebrews entering Syria found it religionised by Assyria and
Babylonia, whence Accadian Ishtar had passed west and had become
Ashtoreth, Ashtaroth or Ashirah,[FN#392] the Anaitis of Armenia,
the Phœnician Astarte and the Greek Aphrodite, the great Moon-
goddess,[FN#393] who is queen of Heaven and Love. In another
phase she was Venus Mylitta = the Procreatrix, in Chaldaic
Mauludatá 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 Kadeshah, 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 who were not
men" practiced 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
Dionæa 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.[FN#394]
The Phœnicians 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 popularised by Horace. One of
the headquarters of the cult was Cyprus where, as Servius relates
(Ad Æn. 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 bans planted to the cities
of Samaria.[FN#395] The Jews seem very successfully to have
copied the abominations of their pagan neighbours, even in the
matter of the "dog."[FN#396] In the reign of wicked Rehoboam
(B.C. 975) "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" (I Kings xiv. 20). The
scandal was abated by zealous King Asa (B.C. 958) whose
grandmother[FN#397] was high-priestess of Priapus (princeps in
sacris Priapi): he took away the sodomites out of the land" (I
Kings XV. I2). Yet the prophets were loud in their complaints,
especially the so-called Isaiah (B.C. 760), "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 (B.C. 641) 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 adhæseverunt) appear to have been
near the Temple.
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 mammæ inclinatæ, jacentes et pannosæ, which
prevails over all this part of the belt. Whilst the women to the
North and South have, with local exceptions, the mammæ stantes of
the European virgin,[FN#398] 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
Marathá-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 civilisation which is ante-dated only by the Nilotic: the
mysteries of old Babylon nowhere survive save in certain obscure
tribes like the Mandæans, the Devil-worshippers and the
Alí-iláhi. 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[FN#399] 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
'Afáka 'llah = Allah assain thee (masculine)[FN#400]: the object
is often fanciful but it would be held coarse and immodest to
address an imaginary girl.[FN#401] 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 nothing. 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.[FN#402] 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 lotá, 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-pái káhú = the soil at the lettuce-root. The
Isfahanis retort with the name of a station or halting-place
between the two cities where, under presence of making travellers
stow away their riding-gear, many a Shirazi had been raped: hence
"Zín o takaltú tú bi-bar" = carry within saddle and saddle-cloth!
A favourite Persian punishment for strangers caught in the Harem
or Gynæceum 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 of the 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 Shaykh 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 parse-posse. The same Eastern
"Scrogin" would ask his guests if they had ever seen a man-cannon
(Adami-top); and, on their replying in the negative, a grey-beard
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 1856-57 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.
The cities of Afghanistan and Sind are thoroughly saturated with
Persian vice, and the people sing
Kadr-i-kus Aughán dánad, kadr-i-kunrá Kábuli:
The worth of coynte the Afghan knows: Cabul prefers the
other chose![FN#403]
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 Kajáwas or
camel-panniers: they are called Kúch-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 Rájputs and
Marathás, ignore it. The same may be said of the Kash mirians who
add another Kappa to the tria Kakista, Kappado clans, Kretans,
and Kilicians: the proverb says,
Agar kaht-i-mardum uftad, az ín sih jins kam gírí;
Eki Afghán, dovvum Sindí[FN#404] siyyum
badjins-i-Kashmírí:
Though of men there be famine yet shun these three-
Afghan, Sindi and rascally Kashmírí.
M. Louis Daville describes the infamies of Lahore and Lakhnau
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 Ranjít Singh, the "Lion of the
Panjáb," and his pathic Guláb 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
scandalised by being called Gánd-márá (anus-beater) or Gándú
(anuser) as Englishmen would be. During the years 1843-44 my
regiment, almost all Hindu Sepoys of the Bombay Presidency, was
stationed at a purgatory called Bandar Ghárrá,[FN#405] a sandy
flat with a scatter of verdigris-green milk-bush some forty miles
north of Karáchi 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-Fá'il =the "doer," is not an object of contempt like Al-Mafúl
= 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 trans-migrations through the
lowest forms of life.
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. Kæmpfer 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;[FN#406] these articles were placed
by the women between the labia and an up-and-down movement on the
bed gave a pleasant titillation 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 swell: so according to Amerigo Vespucci American
women could artificially increase the size of their husbands'
parts.[FN#407] The Chinese bracelet of caoutchouc studded with
points now takes the place of the Herisson, or Annulus
hirsutus,[FN#408] which was bound between the glans and prepuce.
Of the penis succedaneus, that imitation of the Arbor vitæ or
Soter Kosmou, which the Latins called phallus and
fascinum,[FN#409] 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,"[FN#410] 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 Caudish's Circumnavigation, and vol. vi. of Pinkerton's
Geography translated by Walckenaer.
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 civilised cities, unnecessary and therefore
unknown to simple savagery, where the births of both sexes are
about equal and female infanticide is not practiced. In many
parts of the New World this perversion was accompanied by another
depravity of taste--confirmed cannibalism.[FN#411] 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;[FN#412] yet the Brazilian Tupis
preferred the meat of man to every other food.
A glance at Mr. Bancroft[FN#413] 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 a great acquisition. These male concubines are
called Achnutschik or Schopans" (the authorities quoted 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 out 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, Mofras, 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 practiced 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 good wives (i.
733-74). Of the Nahua nations Father Pierre de Gand (alias de
Musa) writes, "Un certain nombre de prâtres 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
ens 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 anxious 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 Americains, London, I77I)
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. According to Gomara there were at
Tamalpais 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 justify, the
cruelties of the Conquistadores. Pederasty was also general
throughout Nicaragua, and the early explorers found it amongst
the indigenes of Panama.
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
