Calvin, whom half educated Roman Catholics in England firmly believe
to have been a pederast. This arose, I suppose, from his meddling with
Rabelais who, in return for the good joke Rabie læsus, presented a
better anagram, “Jan (a pimp or cuckold) Cul” (Calvinus).
Footnote 319:
There is no more immoral work than the “Old Testament.” Its deity is
an ancient Hebrew of the worst type, who condones, permits or commands
every sin in the Decalogue to a Jewish patriarch, _quâ_ patriarch. He
orders Abraham to murder his son and allows Jacob to swindle his
brother; Moses to slaughter an Egyptian and the Jews to plunder and
spoil a whole people, after inflicting upon them a series of plagues
which would be the height of atrocity if the tale were true. The
nations of Canaan are then extirpated. Ehud, for treacherously
disembowelling King Eglon, is made judge over Israel. Jael is blessed
above women (Joshua v. 24) for vilely murdering a sleeping guest; the
horrid deeds of Judith and Esther are made examples to mankind; and
David, after an adultery and a homicide which deserved ignominious
death, is suffered to massacre a host of his enemies, cutting some in
two with saws and axes and putting others into brick-kilns. For
obscenity and impurity we have the tales of Onan and Tamar, Lot and
his daughters, Amnon and his fair sister (2 Sam. xiii.), Absalom and
his father’s concubines, the “wife of whoredoms” of Hosea and, capping
all, the Song of Solomon. For the horrors forbidden to the Jews, who,
therefore, must have practised them, see Levit. viii. 24; xi. 5; xvii.
7; xviii. 7, 9, 10, 12, 15, 17, 21, 23, and xx. 3. For mere filth what
can be fouler than 1st Kings, xviii. 27; Tobias ii. 11; Esther xiv. 2;
Eccl. xxii. 2; Isaiah xxxvi. 12; Jeremiah iv. 5, and (Ezekiel iv.
12–15), where the Lord changes human ordure into “Cow-chips!” Ce qui
excuse Dieu, said Henri Beyle, c’est qu’il n’existe pas,—I add, as man
has made him.
Footnote 320:
It was the same in England before the “Reformation,” and in France
where, during our days, a returned priesthood collected in a few years
“Peter-pence” to the tune of five hundred millions of francs. And
these men wonder at being turned out!
Footnote 321:
Deutsch on the Talmud: Quarterly Review, 1867.
Footnote 322:
Evidently. Its cosmogony is a myth read literally: its history is, for
the most part, a highly immoral distortion, and its ethics are those
of the Talmudic Hebrews. It has done good work in its time; but now it
shows only decay and decrepitude in the place of vigour and progress.
It is dying hard, but it is dying of the slow poison of science.
Footnote 323:
These Hebrew Stoics would justly charge the Founder of Christianity
with preaching a more popular and practical doctrine, but a
degradation from their own far higher and more ideal standard.
Footnote 324:
Dr. Theodore Christlieb (“Modern Doubt and Christian Relief,”
Edinburgh: Clark, 1874) can even now write;—“So then the ‘full age’ to
which humanity is at present supposed to have attained, consists in
man’s doing good purely for goodness sake! Who sees not the hollowness
of this bombastic talk. _That_ man has yet to be born whose practice
will be regulated by this insipid theory (_dieser grauen Theorie_).
What is the idea of goodness per se? * * * The abstract idea of
goodness is not an effectual motive for well-doing” (p. 104). My only
comment is _c’est ignoble!_ His reverence acts the part of Satan in
Holy Writ, “Does Job serve God for naught?” Compare this selfish,
irreligious, and immoral view with Philo Judæus (On the Allegory of
the Sacred Laws, cap. lviii.), to measure the extent of the fall from
Pharisaism to Christianity. And the latter is still infected with the
“bribe-and-threat doctrine:” I once immensely scandalised a Consular
Chaplain by quoting the noble belief of the ancients, and it was some
days before he could recover mental equanimity. The degradation is now
inbred.
Footnote 325:
Of the doctrine of the Fall the heretic Marcion wrote: “The Deity must
either be deficient in goodness if he willed, in prescience if he did
not foresee, or in power if he did not prevent it.”
Footnote 326:
In his charming book, “India Revisited.”
Footnote 327:
This is the answer to those who contend with much truth that the
moderns are by no means superior to the ancients of Europe: they look
at the results of only 3000 years instead of 30,000 or 300,000.
Footnote 328:
As a maxim the saying is attributed to the Duc de Lévis, but it is
much older.
Footnote 329:
There are a few, but only a few, frightful exceptions to this rule,
especially in the case of Khálid bin Walíd, the Sword of Allah, and
his ferocious friend, Darár ibn al-Azwar. But their cruel excesses
were loudly blamed by the Moslems, and Caliph Omar only obeyed the
popular voice in superseding the fierce and furious Khalid by the mild
and merciful Abú Obaydah.
Footnote 330:
This too when St. Paul sends the Christian slave Onesimus back to his
unbelieving (?) master, Philemon; which in Al-Islam would have created
a scandal.
Footnote 331:
This too when the Founder of Christianity talks of “Eating and
drinking at his table!” (Luke xxii. 29). My notes have often touched
upon this inveterate prejudice, the result, like the soul-less woman
of Al-Islam, of ad captandum, pious fraud. “No soul knoweth what joy
of the eyes is reserved for the good in recompense for their works”
(Koran xxxii. 17) is surely as “spiritual” as St. Paul (I Cor. ii.,
9.) Some lies, however, are very long-lived, especially those begotten
by self-interest.
Footnote 332:
I have elsewhere noted its strict conservatism which, however, it
shares with all Eastern faiths in the East. But progress, not
quietism, is the principle which governs humanity and it is favoured
by events of most different nature. In Egypt the rule of Mohammed Ali
the Great and in Syria the Massacre of Damascus (1860) have greatly
modified the constitution of Al-Islam throughout the nearer East.
Footnote 333:
Chapt. viii. “Narrative of a Year’s Journey through Central and
Eastern Arabia;” London, Macmillan, 1865.
Footnote 334:
The Soc. Jesu has, I believe, a traditional conviction that converts
of Israelitic blood bring only misfortune to the Order.
Footnote 335:
I especially allude to an able but most superficial book, the “Ten
Great Religions” by James F. Clarke (Boston, Osgood, 1876), which
caricatures and exaggerates the false portraiture of Mr. Palgrave.
The writer’s admission that, “Something is always gained by learning
what the believers in a system have to say in its behalf,” clearly
shows us the man we have to deal with and the “depths of his
self-consciousness.”
Footnote 336:
But how could the Arabist write such hideous grammar as “La Ilāh illa
Allāh” for “Lá iláha (accus.) ill’ Allah?”
Footnote 337:
p. 996 “Muhammad” in vol. iii. Dictionary of Christian Biography. See
also the Illustration of the Mohammedan Creed, etc. from Al-Ghazáli
introduced (pp. 72–77) into Bell and Sons’ “History of the Saracens”
by Simon Ockley, B.D. (London, 1878). I regret that some Orientalist
did not correct the proofs: everybody will not detect “Al-Lauh
al-Mahfúz” (the Guarded Tablet) in “Allauh ho’hnehphoud” (p. 171); and
this but a pinch out of a camel-load.
Footnote 338:
The word should have been Arianism. This “heresy” of the early
Christians was much aided by the “Discipline of the Secret,” supposed
to be of apostolic origin, which concealed from neophytes, catechumens
and penitents all the higher mysteries, like the Trinity, the
Incarnation, the Metastoicheiosis (transubstantiation), the Real
Presence, the Eucharist and the Seven Sacraments; when Arnobius could
ask, Quid Deo cum vino est? and when Justin, fearing the charge of
Polytheism, could expressly declare the inferior nature of the Son to
the Father. Hence the creed was appropriately called Symbol, _i.e._
Sign of the Secret. This “mental reservation” lasted till the Edict of
Toleration, issued by Constantine in the fourth century, held
Christianity secure when divulging her “mysteries”; and it allowed
Arianism to become _the_ popular creed.
Footnote 339:
The Gnostics played rather a fantastic rôle in Christianity with their
Demiurge, their Æonogony, their Æons by syzygies or couples, their
Maio and Sabscho and their beatified bride of Jesus, Sophia Achamoth;
and some of them descended to absolute absurdities _e.g._ the
Tascodrugitæ and the Pattalorhinchitæ who during prayers placed their
fingers upon their noses or in their mouths, &c., reading Psalm cxli.
3.
Footnote 340:
“Kitáb al-’Unwán fí Makáid al-Niswán” = The Book of the Beginnings on
the Wiles of Womankind (Lane i. 38.)
Footnote 341:
This person was one of the Amsál or Exampla of the Arabs. For her
first thirty years she whored; during the next three decades she
pimped for friend and foe; and, during the last third of her life,
when bed-ridden by age and infirmities, she had a buck-goat and a
nanny tied up in her room and solaced herself by contemplating their
amorous conflicts.
Footnote 342:
And modern Moslem feeling upon the subject has apparently undergone a
change. Ashraf Khan, the Afghan poet, sings,
Since I, the parted one, have come the secrets of the world to ken,
Women in hosts therein I find, but few (and very few) of men.
And the Osmanli proverb is, “Of ten men nine are women!”
Footnote 343:
His Persian paper “On the Vindication of the Liberties of the Asiatic
Women” was translated and printed in the Asiatic Annual Register for
1801 (pp. 100–107); it is quoted by Dr. Jon. Scott (Introd. vol. i. p.
xxxiv. _et seq._) and by a host of writers. He also wrote a book of
Travels translated by Prof. Charles Stewart in 1810 and re-issued (3
vols. 8vo.) in 1814.
Footnote 344:
The beginning of which I date from the Hijrah, lit. = the separation,
popularly “The Flight.” Stating the case broadly, it has become the
practice of modern writers to look upon Mohammed as an honest
enthusiast at Meccah and an unscrupulous despot at Al-Medinah, a view
which appears to me eminently unsound and unfair. In a private station
the Meccan Prophet was famed as a good citizen, _teste_ his title
Al-Amín = the Trusty. But when driven from his home by the pagan
faction, he became de facto as de jure a king: nay, a royal pontiff;
and the preacher was merged in the Conqueror of his foes and the
Commander of the Faithful. His rule, like that of all Eastern rulers,
was stained with blood; but, assuming as true all the crimes and
cruelties with which Christians charge him and which Moslems confess,
they were mere blots upon a glorious and enthusiastic life, ending in
a most exemplary death, compared with the tissue of horrors and havock
which the Law and the Prophets attribute to Moses, to Joshua, to
Samuel and to the patriarchs and prophets by express commandment of
Jehovah.
Footnote 345:
It was not, however, incestuous: the scandal came from its ignoring
the Arab “pundonor.”
Footnote 346:
The “opportunism” of Mohammed has been made a matter of obloquy by
many who have not reflected and discovered that time-serving is the
very essence of “Revelation.” Says the Rev. W. Smith (“Pentateuch”
chapt. xiii.), “As the journey (Exodus) proceeds, so laws originate
from the accidents of the way,” and he applies this to successive
decrees (Numbers xxvi. 32–36; xxvii. 8–11 and xxxvi. 1–9) holding it
indirect internal evidence of Mosaic authorship (?) Another tone,
however, is used in the case of Al-Islam. “And now, that he might not
stand in awe of his wives any longer, _down comes a revelation_” says
Ockley in his bluff and homely style, which admits such phrases as,
“the imposter has the impudence to say.” But why, in common honesty,
refuse to the Koran the concessions freely made to the Torah? It is a
mere petitio principii to argue that the latter is “inspired” while
the former is not; moreover, although we may be called upon to believe
things _beyond_ Reason, it is hardly fair to require our belief in
things _contrary_ to Reason.
Footnote 347:
This is noticed in my wife’s volume on The Inner Life of Syria, chapt.
xii. vol. i. 155.
Footnote 348:
Mirza preceding the name means Mister and following it Prince.
Addison’s “Vision of Mirza,” (Spectator, No. 159) is therefore “The
Vision of Mister.”
Footnote 349:
And women. The course of instruction lasts from a few days to a year
and the period of puberty is fêted by magical rites and often by some
form of mutilation. It is described by Waitz, Réclus and Schoolcraft,
Péchuel-Loecksa, Collins, Dawson, Thomas, Brough Smyth, Reverends
Bulmer and Taplin, Carlo Wilhelmi, Wood, A. W. Howitt, C. Z. Muhas
(Mem. de la Soc. Anthrop. Allemande, 1882, p. 265) and by Professor
Mantegazza (chapt. i.) for whom see infra.
Footnote 350:
Similarly certain Australian tribes act scenes of rape and pederasty
saying to the young, If you do this you will be killed.
Footnote 351:
“Báh,” is the popular term for the amatory appetite: hence such works
are called Kutub al-Báh, lit. = Books of Lust.
Footnote 352:
I can make nothing of this title nor can those whom I have consulted:
my only explanation is that they may be fanciful names proper.
Footnote 353:
Amongst the Greeks we find erotic specialists (1) Aristides of the
Libri Milesii; (2) Astyanassa the follower of Helen who wrote on
androgenization; (3) Cyrene the artist of amatory Tabellæ or ex-votos
offered to Priapus; (4) Elephantis the poetess who wrote on Varia
concubitus genera; (5) Evemerus whose Sacra Historia, preserved in a
fragment of Q. Eunius, was collected by Hieronymus Columna; (6)
Hemitheon of the Sybaritic books; (7) Musæus the lyrist; (8) Niko the
Samian girl; (9) Philænis, the poetess of Amatory Pleasures, in Athen.
viii. 13, attributed to Polycrates the Sophist; (10) Protagorides,
Amatory Conversations; (11) Sotades the Mantinæan who, says Suidas,
wrote the poem “Cinædica”; (12) Sphodrias the Cynic, his Art of Love;
and (13) Trepsicles, Amatory Pleasures. Amongst the Romans we have
Aedituus, Annianus (in Ausonius), Anser, Bassus Eubius, Helvius Cinna,
Lævius (of Io and the Erotopægnion), Memmius, Cicero (to Cerellia),
Pliny the Younger, Sabellus (de modo coeundi); Sisenna, the pathic
Poet and translator of Milesian Fables and Sulpitia the modest
erotist. For these see the Dictionnaire Érotique of Blondeau pp. ix.
and x. (Paris, Liseux, 1885).
Footnote 354:
It has been translated from the Sanscrit and annotated by A.F.F. and
B.F.R. Reprint: Cosmopoli: mdccclxxxv: for the Kama Shastra Society,
London and Benares, and for private circulation only. The first print
has been exhausted and a reprint will presently appear.
Footnote 355:
The local press has often proposed to abate this nuisance of erotic
publication which is most debasing to public morals already perverted
enough. But the “Empire of Opinion” cares very little for such matters
and, in the matter of the “native press,” generally seems to seek only
a quiet life. In England if erotic literature were not forbidden by
law, few would care to sell or to buy it, and only the legal pains and
penalties keep up the phenomenally high prices.
Footnote 356:
The Spectator (No. 119) complains of an “infamous piece of good
breeding,” because “men of the town, and particularly those who have
been polished in France, make use of the most coarse and uncivilised
words in our language and utter themselves often in such a manner as a
clown would blush to hear.”
Footnote 357:
See the Novelle of Bandello the Bishop (Tome I; Paris, Liseux, 1879,
small in 18), where the dying fisherman replies to his confessor “Oh!
Oh! your reverence, to amuse myself with boys was natural to me as for
man to eat and drink; yet you asked me if I sinned against nature!”
Amongst the wiser ancients sinning contra naturam was not marrying and
begetting children.
Footnote 358:
Avis au Lecteur, “L’Amour dans l’Humanité,” par P. Mantegazza, traduit
par Emilien Chesneau, Paris, Fetscherin et Chuit, 1886.
Footnote 359:
See “H. B.” (Henry Beyle, French Consul at Civita Vecchia) par un des
Quarante (Prosper Mérimée), Elutheropolis, An mdccclxiv. De
l’Imposture du Nazaréen.
Footnote 360:
This detail especially excited the veteran’s curiosity. The reason
proved to be that the scrotum of the unmutilated boy could be used as
a kind of bridle for directing the movements of the animal. I find
nothing of the kind mentioned in the Sotadical literature of Greece
and Rome; although the same cause might be expected everywhere to have
the same effect. But in Mirabeau (Kadhésch) a grand seigneur moderne,
when his valet-de-chambre de confiance proposes to provide him with
women instead of boys, exclaims, “Des femmes! eh! c’est comme si tu me
servais un gigot sans manche.” See also infra for “Le poids du
tisserand.”
Footnote 361:
See Falconry in the Valley of the Indus, London, John Van Voorst,
1852.
Footnote 362:
Submitted to Government on Dec. 31, ’47 and March 2, ’48, they were
printed in “Selections from the Records of the Government of India.”
Bombay. New Series. No. xvii. Part 2, 1855. These are (1) Notes on the
Population of Sind, etc. and (2) Brief Notes on the Modes of
Intoxication, etc. written in collaboration with my late friend
Assistant-Surgeon John E. Stocks, whose early death was a sore loss to
scientific botany.
Footnote 363:
Glycon the Courtesan in Athen. xiii. 84 declares that “boys are
handsome only when they resemble women;” and so the Learned Lady in
The Nights (vol. v. 160) declares “Boys are likened to girls because
folks say, Yonder boy is like a girl.” For the superior physical
beauty of the human male compared with the female, see The Nights,
vol. iv. 15; and the boy’s voice before it breaks excels that of any
diva.
Footnote 364:
“Mascula,” from the priapiscus, the over-development of clitoris (the
veretrum muliebre, in Arabic Abu Tartúr, habens cristam) which enabled
her to play the man. Sappho (nat. B.C. 612) has been retoillée like
Mary Stuart, La Brinvilliers, Marie Antoinette and a host of feminine
names which have a savour not of sanctity. Maximus of Tyre (Dissert.
xxiv.) declares that the Eros of Sappho was Socratic and that Gyrinna
and Atthis were as Alcibiades and Chermides to Socrates: Ovid, who
could consult documents now lost, takes the same view in the Letter of
Sappho to Phaon and in Tristia ii. 265.
Lesbia quid docuit Sappho nisi amare puellas?
Suidas supports Ovid. Longinus eulogises the ἐρωτικὴ μανία (a term
applied only to carnal love) of the far-famed Ode to Atthis:—
Ille mî par esse Deo videtur * * *
(Heureux! qui près de toi pour toi seule soupire * * *
Blest as th’ immortal gods is he, etc.)
By its love symptoms, suggesting that possession is the sole cure for
passion, Erasistratus discovered the love of Antiochus for Stratonice.
Mure (Hist. of Greek Literature, 1850) speaks of the Ode to Aphrodite
(Frag. 1) as “one in which the whole volume of Greek literature offers
the most powerful concentration into one brilliant focus of the modes
in which amatory concupiscence can display itself.” But Bernhardy,
Bode, Richter, K. O. Müller and esp. Welcker have made Sappho a model
of purity, much like some of our dull wits who have converted
Shakespeare, that most debauched genius, into a good British
bourgeois.
Footnote 365:
The Arabic Sahhákah, the Tractatrix or Subigitatrix, who has been
noticed in vol. iv. 134. Hence to Lesbianise (λεσβίζειν) and
tribassare (τρίβεσθαι); the former applied to the love of woman for
woman and the latter to its mécanique: this is either natural, as
friction of the labia and insertion of the clitoris when unusually
developed; or artificial by means of the fascinum, the artificial
penis (the Persian “Mayájang”); the patte de chat, the banana-fruit
and a multitude of other succedanea. As this feminine perversion is
only glanced at in The Nights I need hardly enlarge upon the subject.
Footnote 366:
Plato (Symp.) is probably mystical when he accounts for such passions
by there being in the beginning three species of humanity, men, women
and men-women or androgynes. When the latter were destroyed by Zeus
for rebellion, the two others were individually divided into equal
parts. Hence each division seeks its other half in the same sex; the
primitive man prefers men and the primitive woman women. C’est beau,
but—is it true? The idea was probably derived from Egypt which
supplied the Hebrews with androgynic humanity; and thence it passed to
extreme India, where Shiva as Ardhanárí was male on one side and
female on the other side of the body, combining paternal and maternal
qualities and functions. The first creation of humans (Gen. i. 27) was
hermaphrodite (= Hermes and Venus) masculum et fœminam creavit
eos—male and female created He them—on the sixth day, with the command
to increase and multiply (ibid. v. 28) while Eve the woman was created
subsequently. Meanwhile, say certain Talmudists, Adam carnally
copulated with all races of animals. See L’Anandryne in Mirabeau’s
Erotika Biblion, where Antoinette Bourgnon laments the undoubling
which disfigured the work of God, producing monsters incapable of
independent self-reproduction like the vegetable kingdom.
Footnote 367:
De la Femme, Paris, 1827.
Footnote 368:
Die Lustsuche des Alterthum’s, Halle, 1839.
Footnote 369:
See his exhaustive article on (Grecian) “Paederastie” in the
Allgemeine Encyclopædie of Ersch and Gruber, Leipzig, Brockhaus, 1837.
He carefully traces it through the several states, Dorians, Æolians,
Ionians, the Attic cities and those of Asia Minor. For these details I
must refer my readers to M. Meier; a full account of these would fill
a volume not the section of an essay.
Footnote 370:
Against which see Henri Estienne, Apologie pour Hérodote, a society
satire of xvi^{th} century, lately reprinted by Liseux.
Footnote 371:
In Sparta the lover was called εἰσπνήλας or εἴσπνηλος and the beloved
as in Thessaly ἀΐτας or ἀΐτης.
Footnote 372:
The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never
worshipped anything but himself. Zeus, who became Jupiter, was an
ancient king, according to the Cretans, who were entitled liars
because they showed his burial-place. From a deified ancestor he would
become a local god, like the Hebrew Jehovah as opposed to Chemosh of
Moab; the name would gain amplitude by long time and distant travel
and the old island chieftain would end in becoming the Demiurgus.
Ganymede (who possibly gave rise to the old Lat. “Catamitus”) was
probably some fair Phrygian boy (“son of Tros”) who in process of time
became a symbol of the wise man seized by the eagle (perspicacity) to
be raised amongst the Immortals; and the chaste myth simply signified
that only the prudent are loved by the gods. But it rotted with age as
do all things human. For the Pederastía of the Gods see Bayle under
Chrysippe.
Footnote 373:
See Dissertation sur les idées morales des Grecs et sur les danger de
lire Platon. Par M. Audé, Bibliophile, Rouen, Lemonnyer, 1879. This is
the pseudonym of the late Octave Delepierre, who published with Gay,
but not the Editio Princeps—which, if I remember rightly, contains
much more matter.
Footnote 374:
The phrase of J. Matthias Gesner, Comm. Reg. Soc. Gottingen i. 1–32.
It was founded upon Erasmus’ “Sancte Socrate, ora pro nobis,” and the
article was translated by M. Alcide Bonmaire, Paris, Liseux, 1877.
Footnote 375: