Intermediate Types among Primitive Folk
Edward Carpenter
First published in 1914.
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Table of Contents
III. As Inventors Of The Arts And Crafts
IV. Hermaphrodism Among Gods And Mortals
V. Military Comradeship Among The Dorian Greeks
VI. The Dorian Comradeship In Relation To The Status Of Woman
VII. Relation To Civic Life And Religion
VIII. The Samurai Of Japan: And Their Ideal
Introduction
THAT between the normal man and the normal woman there exist a great number of intermediate types--types, for instance, in which the body may be perfectly feminine, while the mind and feelings are decidedly masculine, or vice versâ--is a thing which only a few years ago was very little understood. But to-day--thanks to the labours of a number of scientific men--the existence of these types is generally recognised and admitted; it is known that the variations in question, whether affecting the body or the mind, are practically always congenital; and that similar variations have existed in considerable abundance in all ages and among all races of the world. Since the Christian era these intermediate types have been much persecuted in some periods and places, while in others they have been mildly tolerated; but that they might possibly fulfil a positive and useful function of any kind in society is an idea which seems hardly if ever to have been seriously considered.
Such an idea, however, must have been familiar in pre-Christian times and among the early civilisations, and if not consciously analysed or generalised in philosophical form, it none the less underran the working customs and life of many, if not most primitive tribes--in such a way that the intermediate people and their corresponding sex-relationships played a distinct part in the life of the tribe or nation, and were openly acknowledged and recognised as part of the general polity.
It is probably too early at present to formulate any elaborate theory as to the various workings of this element in the growth of society. It might be easy to enter into a tirade against sex-inversion in general and to point out and insist on all the evils which may actually or possibly flow from it. But this would not be the method either of commonsense or of science; and if one is to understand any widespread human tendency it is obvious that the procedure has to be different from this. One has to enquire first what advantages (if any) may have flowed, or been reported to flow, from the tendency, what place it may possibly have occupied in social life, and what (if any) were its healthy, rather than its unhealthy, manifestations. Investigating thus in this case, we are surprised to find how often-according to the views of these early peoples themselves-inversion in some form was regarded as a necessary part of social life, and the Uranian man accorded a certain meed of honour.
it would seem-as a first generalisation on this unexplored subject--that there have been two main directions in which the intermediate types have penetrated into the framework of normal society, and made themselves useful if not indispensable. And the two directions have been in some sense opposite, the one being towards service in Warfare and the other towards the service of Religion. It would seem that where the homosexual tendency was of the robuster and more manly sort, leading men to form comrade alliances with each other in the direction of active and practical life, this tendency was soon reinforced and taken advantage of by the military spirit. Military comradeship grew into an institution, and the peoples who adopted it became extraordinarily successful in warfare, and overcoming other tribes spread their customs among them. Such was the case with the Dorian Greeks, whose comradeship institutions form the subjects of chapters v., vi., and vii. of this book; and such also appears to have been the case in a somewhat different way with the Samurai of Japan (chapter viii.) in the twelfth and succeeding centuries; and in lesser degree with many Mohammedan. peoples in Arabia, Persia, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
On the other hand, it would seem that where the homosexual tendency was of a more effeminate and passive sort, it led to a distaste, on the part of those individuals or groups who were affected by it, for the ordinary masculine occupations and business of the world, and to an inclination to retire into the precincts of the Temples and the services (often sexual) of Religion--which, of course in primitive days, meant not only the religious life in our sense, but the dedication to such things as Magic, learning, poetry, music, prophecy, and other occupations not generally favoured by the normal man, the hunter and the warrior. There are also some considerations which go to show that this class of Intermediate did actually tend to develop faculties like divination, clairvoyance, ecstasy, and so forth, which are generally and quite naturally associated with religion.
This connection of homosexuality with divination and religion I have made the special subject of the first portion of this book; and it certainly is remarkable to find--even from this slight study--how widespread the connection has been among the primitive peoples and civilisations.
I. As Prophet Or Priest
A CURIOUS and interesting subject is the connection of the Uranian temperament with prophetic gifts and divination. It is a subject which, as far as I know, has not been very seriously considered--though it has been touched upon by Elie Reclus, Westermarck, Bastian, Iwan Bloch, and others. The fact is well known, of course, that in the temples and cults of antiquity and of primitive races it has been a widespread practice to educate and cultivate certain youths in an effeminate manner, and that these youths in general become the priests or medicine-men of the tribe; but this fact has hardly been taken seriously, as indicating any necessary connection between the two functions, or any relation in general between homosexuality and psychic powers. Some such relation or connection, however, I think we must admit as being obviously indicated by the following facts; and the admission leads us on to the further enquiry of what the relation may exactly be, and what its rationale and explanation.
Among the tribes, for instance, in the neighbourhood of Behring’s Straits--the Kamchadales, the Chukchi, the Aleuts, Inoits, Kadiak islanders, and so forth, homosexuality is common, and its relation to shamanship or priesthood most marked and curious. Westermarck, in his well-known book, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas,[1] quoting from Dr. Bogoraz, says: - “It frequently happens that, under the supernatural influence of one of their shamans, or priests, a Chukchi lad at sixteen years of age will suddenly relinquish his sex and imagine himself to be a woman. He adopts a woman’s attire, lets his hair grow, and devotes himself altogether to female occupation. Furthermore, this disclaimer of his sex takes a husband into the yurt (hut) and does all the work which is usually incumbent on the wife, in most unnatural and voluntary subjection. . . . These abnormal changes of sex imply the most abject immorality in the community, and appear to be strongly encouraged by the shamans, who interpret such cases as an injunction of their individual deity.” Further, Westermarck says “the change of sex was usually accompanied by future shamanship; indeed nearly all the shamans were former delinquents of their sex.” Again he says, “In describing the Koriaks, Krasheninnikoff makes mention of the Ke’yev, that is men occupying the position of concubines, and he compares them with the Kamchadale Koe’kcuc, as he calls them, that is men transformed into women. Every Koe’kcuc, he says, ‘is regarded as a magician and interpreter of dreams. . . . The Koe’kcuc wore women’s clothes, did women’s work, and were in the position of wives or concubines.’” And (on p. 472) “There is no indication that the North American aborigines attached any opprobrium to men who had intercourse with those members of their own sex who had assumed the. dress and habits of women. In Kadiak such a companion was on the contrary regarded as a great acquisition; and the effeminate men, far from being despised, were held in repute by the people, most of them being wizards.”
This connection with wizardry and religious divination is particularly insisted upon by Elie Reclus, in his Primitive Folk (Contemporary Science Series). Speaking of the Inoits (p. 68) he says: - “Has a boy with a pretty face also a graceful demeanour? The mother no longer permits him to associate with companions of his own age, but clothes him and brings him up as a girl. Any stranger would be deceived as to his sex, and when he is about fifteen he is sold for a good round sum to a wealthy personage.[2] ’Choupans,’ or youths of this kind are highly prized by the Konyagas. On the other hand, there are to be met with here and there among the Esquimaux or kindred populations, especially in Youkon, girls who decline marriage and maternity. Changing their sex, so to speak, they live as boys, adopting masculine manners and customs, they hunt the stag, and in the chase shrink from no danger; in fishing from no fatigue.”
Reclus then says that the Choupans commonly dedicate themselves to the priesthood; but all are not qualified for this. “To become an angahok it is needful to have a very marked vocation, and furthermore a character and temperament which every one has not. The priests in office do not leave the recruiting of their pupils to chance; they make choice at an early age of boys or girls, not limiting themselves to one sex--a mark of greater intelligence than is exhibited by most other priesthoods” (p. 71). The pupil has to go through considerable ordeals: - “Disciplined by abstinence and prolonged vigils, by hardship and constraint, be must learn to endure pain stoically and to subdue his bodily desires, to make the body obey unmurmuringly the commands of the spirit. Others may be chatterers; he will be silent, as becomes the prophet and the soothsayer. At an early age the novice courts solitude. He wanders throughout the long nights across silent plains filled with the chilly whiteness of the moon; he listens to the wind moaning over the desolate floes;--and then the aurora borealis, that ardently sought occasion for ‘drinking in the light,’ the angahok must absorb all its brilliancies and splendours. . . . And now the future sorcerer is no longer a child. Many a time he has felt himself in the presence of Sidné, the Esquimaux Demeter, he has divined it by the shiver which ran through his veins, by the tingling of his flesh and the bristling of his hair. . . . He sees stars unknown to the profane; he asks the secrets of destiny from Sirius, Algol, and Altair; he passes through a series of initiations, knowing well that his spirit will not be loosed from the burden of dense matter and crass ignorance, until the moon has looked him in the face, and darted a certain ray into his eyes. At last his own Genius, evoked from the bottomless depths of existence, appears to him, having scaled the immensity of the heavens, and climbed across the abysses of the ocean. White, wan, and solemn, the phantom will say to him: ‘Behold me, what dost thou desire?’ Uniting himself with the Double from beyond the grave, the soul of the angakok flies upon the wings of the wind, and quitting the body at will, sails swift and light through the universe. It is permitted to probe all hidden things, to seek the knowledge of all mysteries, in order that they may be revealed to those who have remained mortal with spirit unrefined” (p. 73).
Allowing something for poetic and imaginative expression, the above statement of the ordeals and initiations of the angakok, and their connection with the previous career of the Choupan are well based on the observations of many authorities, as well as on their general agreement with similar facts all over the world. There is also another passage of Reclus (p. 70) on the duties of the angahok, which seems to throw considerable light on certain passages in the Bible referring to the kedeshim and kedeshoth of the Syrian cults, also on the kosio of the Slave Coast and the early functions of the priesthood in general: - “As soon as the Choupan has moulted into the angakok, the tribe confide to him the girls most suitable in bodily grace and disposition; he has to complete their education--he will perfect them in dancing and other accomplishments, and finally will initiate them into the pleasures of love. If they display intelligence, they will become seers and medicine-women, priestesses and prophetesses. The summer kachims (assemblies), which are closed to the women of the community, will open wide before these. It is believed that these girls would be unwholesome company if they had not been purified by commerce with a man of God.”
Catlin, in his North American Indians (vol. i., pp. 112-114), describes how on one occasion he was in a large tent occupied in painting portraits of some of the chiefs of the tribe (the Mandans) among whom he was staying, when he noticed at the door of the tent, but not venturing to come in, three or four young men of handsome presence and rather elegantly dressed, but not wearing the eagle’s feathers of warriors. He mentally decided to paint the portrait of one of these also; and on a later day when he had nearly done with the chiefs, he invited one of these others to come in and stand for him. The youth was overjoyed at the compliment, and smiled all over his face. He was clad from head to foot in the skin of the mountain goat, which for softness and whiteness is almost like Chinese crape, embroidered with ermine and porcupine quills; and with his pipe and his whip in his hand, and his long hair falling over neck and shoulders, made a striking and handsome figure, which showed, too, a certain grace and gentleness as of good breeding. “There was nought about him of the terrible,” says Catlin, “and nought to shock the finest, chastest intellect.” But to Catlin’s surprise, no sooner had he begun to sketch his new subject, than the chiefs rose up, flung their buffalo robes around them, and stalked out of the tent.
Catlin’s interpreter afterwards explained to him the position of these men and the part they played in the tribal life; and how the chiefs were offended at the idea of their being placed on an equality with themselves. But the offence, it seemed, was not on any ground of immorality; but--and this is corroborated by the customs of scores of other tribes--arose simply from the fact that the young men were associated with the women, and shared their modes of life, and were not worthy therefore to rank among the warriors. In their own special way they held a position of some honour.
“Among the Illinois Indians,” says Westermarck (vol. ii., p. 473), “the effeminate men assist in [i.e., are present at] all the juggleries and the solemn dance in honour of the calumet, or sacred tobacco-pipe, for which the Indians have such a deference. . . . but they are not permitted either to dance or to sing. They are called into the councils of the Indians, and nothing can be decided without their advice; for because of their extraordinary manner of living they are looked upon as manitous, or supernatural beings, and persons of consequence.” “The Sioux, Sacs, and Fox Indians,” he continues, “give once a year, or oftener, a feast to the Berdashe, or I-coo-coo-a, who is a man dressed in women’s clothes, as he has been all his life.” And Catlin (N.A. Indians, vol. ii., p. 214) says of this Berdashe: - “For extraordinary privileges which he is known to possess, he is driven to the most servile and degrading duties, which he is not allowed to escape; and he being the only one of the tribe submitting to this disgraceful degradation is looked upon as medicine and sacred, and a feast is given to him annually; and initiatory to it a dance by those few young men of the tribe who can--as in the illustration--dance forward and publicly make their boast (without the denial of the Berdashe) that” [then follow three or four unintelligible lines of some native dialect; and then] “such and such only are allowed to enter the dance and partake of the feast.”
In this connection it may not be out of place to quote Joaquin Miller (who spent his early life as a member of an Indian tribe) on the prophetic powers of these people. He says (“Life among the Modocs,” p. 360) “If there is a race of men that has the gift of prophecy or prescience I think it is the Indian. It may be a keen instinct sharpened by meditation that makes them foretell. many things with such precision, but I have seen some things that looked much like the fulfilment of prophecies. They believe in the gift of prophecy thoroughly, and are never without their seers.”
In this connection we may quote the curious remark of Herodotus, who, after mentioning (i. 105) that some of the Scythians suffered from a disease of effeminacy (Θήλεια νόσος), and were called Enarees, says (iv. 67) that “these Enarees, or Androgyni, were endowed by Venus with the power of divination,” and were consulted by the King of the Scythians when the latter was ill.
The Jesuit father Lafitau, who published in 1724, at Paris, an extremely interesting book on the manners and customs of the North American tribes among whom he had been a missionary,[3] after speaking of warlike women and Amazons, says (vol. I, p. 53): - “If some women are found possessing virile courage, and glorying in the profession of war, which seems only suitable to men; there exist also men so cowardly as to live like women. Among the Illinois, among the Sioux, in Louisiana, in Florida, and in Yucatan, there are found youths who adopt the garb of women and preserve it all their lives, and who think themselves honoured in stooping to all their occupations; they never marry; they take part in all ceremonies in which religion seems to be concerned; and this profession of an extraordinary life causes them to pass for beings of a superior order, and above the common run of mankind. Would not these be the same kind of folk as the Asiatic worshippers of Cybele, or those Easterns of whom Julius Firmicus speaks (Lib. de Errore prof. Relig.), who consecrated to the Goddess of Phrygia, or to Venus Urania, certain priests, who dressed as women, who affected an effeminate countenance, who painted their faces, and disguised their true sex under garments borrowed from the sex which they wished to counterfeit.”
The instance, just quoted, of the Enarees among the Scythians, who by excessive riding were often rendered impotent and effeminate, is very curiously paralleled in quite another part of the world by the so-called mujerados (or feminised men) among the Pueblo-Indians of Mexico. Dr. W. A. Hammond, who was stationed, in 1850, as military doctor, in New Mexico, reported [4] that in each village one of the strongest men, being chosen, was compelled by unintermitted riding to pass through this kind of metamorphosis.” He then became indispensable for the religious orgies which were celebrated among the Pueblo-Indians in the same way as they once were among the old Greeks, Egyptians, and other people. . . . These Saturnalia take place among the Pueblos in the Spring of every year, and are kept with the greatest secrecy from the observation of non-Indians.”[5] And again, “To be a mujerado is no disgrace to a Pueblo-Indian. On the contrary, he enjoys the protection of his tribes-people, and is accorded a certain amount of honour.”
Similar customs to those of the American Indians were found among the Pacific islanders. Captain James Wilson,[6] in visiting the South Sea Islands in 1796-8, found there men who were dressed like women and enjoyed a certain honour; and expresses his surprise at finding that “even their women do not despise these fellows, but form friendships with them.” While William Ellis, also a Missionary, in his Polynesian Researches,[7] (vol. i., p. 340), says that they not only enjoyed the sanction of the priests, but even the direct example of one of their divinities. He goes on to say that when he asked the natives why they made away with so many more female than male children, “they generally answered that the fisheries, the service of the temple and especially war were the only purposes for which they thought it desirable to rear children!”
But one of the most interesting examples of the connection we are studying is that of Apollo with the temple at Delphi. Delphi, of course, was one of the chief seats of prophecy and divination in the old world, and Apollo, who presided at this shrine, was a strange blend of masculine and feminine attributes. It will be remembered that he was frequently represented as being very feminine in form--especially in the more archaic statues. He was the patron of song and music. He was also, in some ways, the representative divinity of the Uranian love, for he was the special god of the Dorian Greeks, among whom comradeship became an institution.[8] It was said of him that to expiate his pollution by the blood of the Python (whom he slew), he became the slave and devoted favorite of Admetus; and Müller[9] describes a Dorian religious festival, in which a boy, taking the part of Apollo, “probably imitated the manner in which the god, as herdsman and slave of Alcestis, submitted to the most degrading service.” Alcestis, in fact, the wife of Admetus, said of Apollo (in a verse of Sophocles cited by Plutarch): οὑμὸς δ`ἀλέκτωρ αὐτον ἦγε πρὸς “μύλην”. When we consider that Apollo, as Sun god, corresponds in some points to the Syrian Baal (masculine), and that in his epithet Karneios, used among the Dorians,[10] he corresponds to the Syrian Ashtaroth Karnaim (feminine), we seem to see a possible clue connecting certain passages in the Bible--which refer to the rites of the Syrian tribes and their occasional adoption in the Jewish Temple--with some phases of the Dorian religious ritual.
“The Hebrews entering Syria,” says Richard Burton,[11] ”found it religionised by Assyria and Babylonia, when the Accadian Ishtar had passed West, and had become Ashtoreth, Ashtaroth, or Ashirah, the Anaitis of Armenia, the Phœnician Astarte, and the Greek Aphrodite, the great Moon-goddess who is queen of Heaven and Love. . . . She was worshipped by men habited as women, and vice versâ; for which reason, in the Torah (Deut. xxii. 5), the sexes are forbidden to change dress.”
In the account of the reforming zeal of King Josiah (2 Kings xxiii.) we are told (v. 4) that “the King commanded Hilkiah, the high priest, and the priests of the second order, and the keepers of the door, to bring forth out of the temple of the Lord all the vessels that were made for Baal, and for the grove, and for all the host of heaven; and he burned them without Jerusalem in the fields of Kidron. . . . And he brake down the houses of the sodomites, that were by the house of the Lord, where the women wove hangings for the grove.”
The word here translated “sodomites” is the Hebrew word Kedeshim, meaning the “consecrated ones” (males), and it occurs again in 1 Kings xiv. 24; xv. 12; and xxii. 46. And the word translated “grove” is Asherah. There is some doubt, I believe, as to the exact function of these Kedeshim in the temple ritual, and some doubt as to whether the translation of the word given in our Authorised Version is justified.[12] It is clear, however, that these men corresponded in some way to the Kedeshoth or sacred women, who were--like the Devadasis of the Hindu temples--a kind of courtesan or prostitute dedicated to the god, and strange as it may seem to the modern mind, it is probable that they united some kind of sexual service with prophetic functions. Dr. Frazer, speaking[13] of the sacred slaves or Kedeshim in various parts of Syria, concludes that “originally no sharp line of distinction existed between the prophets and the Kedeshim; both were ‘men of God,’ as the prophets were constantly called; in other words they were inspired mediums, men in whom the god manifested himself from time to time by word and deed, in short, temporary incarnations of the deity. But while the prophets roved freely about the country, the Kedeshim appears to have been regularly attached to a sanctuary, and among the duties which they performed at the shrines there were clearly some which revolted the conscience of men imbued with a purer morality.”
As to the Asherah, or sometimes plural Asherim, translated “grove,”--for which the women wove hangings--the most generally accepted opinion is that it was a wooden post or tree stripped of its branches and planted in the ground beside an altar, whether of Jehovah or other gods.[14] Several biblical passages, like Jeremiah ii. 27, suggest that it was an emblem of Baal or of the male organ, and others (e.g., Judges ii. 13, and iii. 7) connect it with Ashtoreth, the female partner of Baal; while the weaving of hangings or garments for the “grove” suggests the combination of female with male in one effigy.[15] At any rate we may conclude pretty safely that the thing or things had a strongly sexual signification.
Thus it would seem that in the religious worship of the Canaanites there were male courtesans attached to the temples and inhabiting their precincts, as well as consecrated females, and that the ceremonies connected with these cults were of a markedly sexual character. These ceremonies had probably originated in an ancient worship of sexual acts as being symbolical of, and therefore favorable to, the fertility of Nature and the crops. But though they had penetrated into the Jewish temple they were detested by the more zealous adherents of Jehovah, because--for one reason at any rate--they belonged to the rival cult of the Syrian Baal and Ashtoreth, the Kedeshim in fact being “consecrated to the Mother of the Gods, the famous Dea Syria.”[16] And they were detestable, too, because they went hand in hand with the cultivation of ‘familiar spirits’ and ‘wizards’--who of course knew nothing of Jehovah! Thus we see (2 Kings xxi.) that Manasseh followed the abominations of the heathen, building up the high places and the ‘groves’ and the altars for Baal. “And he made his son pass through the fire, and observed times, and used enchantments,[17] and dealt with familiar spirits and wizards, and wrought much wickedness. . . . and he set a graven image of the ‘grove’ in the house of the Lord.” But Josiah, his grandson, reversed all this, and drove the familiar spirits and the wizards out of the land, together with the Kedeshim.
So far with regard to Syria and the Bible. But Dr. Fraser points out the curious likeness here to customs existing to-day among the Negroes of the Slave Coast of West Africa. In that region, women, called Kosio, are attached to the temples as wives, priestesses and temple prostitutes of the python-god. But besides these “there are male Kosio as well as female Kosio, that is there are dedicated men as well as dedicated women, priests as well as priestesses, and the ideas and customs in regard to them seem to be similar.[18] “Indeed,” he says, “the points of resemblance between the prophets of Israel and of West Africa are close and curious.”[19] It must be said, however, that Dr. Frazer does not in either case insist on the inference of homosexuality. On the contrary, he rather endeavours to avoid it, and of course it would be unreasonable to suppose any invariable connection of these “sacred men” with this peculiarity. At the same time the general inference in that direction is strong and difficult to evade.
Throughout China and Japan and much of Malaysia, the so-called Bonzes, or Buddhist priests, have youths or boys attached to the service of the temples. Each priest educates a novice to follow him in the ritual, and it is said that the relations between the two are often physically intimate. Francis Xavier, in his letters from Japan (in 1549), mentions this. He says that the Bonzes themselves allowed that this was so, but maintained that it was no sin. They said that intercourse with woman was for them a deadly sin, or even punishable with death; but that the other relation was, in their eyes, by no means execrable, but harmless and even commendable.[20] And, as it was then, so on the whole it appears to be now, or to have been till very lately. In all the Buddhist sects in Japan (except Shinto) celibacy is imposed on the priests, but homosexual relations are not forbidden.
And to return to the New World, we find Cieza de Leon-who is generally considered a trustworthy authority--describing practices and ceremonials in the temples of New Granada in his time (1550) strangely similar to those referred to in the Hebrew Bible: - “Every temple or chief house of worship keeps one or two men, or more, according to the idol--who go about attired like women, even from their childhood, and talk like women, and imitate them in their manner, carriage, and all else.” [21]
These served in the temples, and were made use of “almost as if by way of sanctity and religion” (casi come por via de santidad y religion); and he concludes that “the Devil had gained such mastery in that land that, not content with causing the people to fall into mortal sin, he had actually persuaded them that the same was a species of holiness and religion, in order that by so doing he might render them all the more subject to him.
And this (he says) Fray Domingo told me in his own writing--a man of whom everyone knows what a lover of truth he is.”
Thus, as Richard Burton remarks,[22] these same usages in connection with religion have spread nearly all over the world and “been adopted by the priestly castes from Mesopotamia to Peru.”
It is all very strange and difficult to understand. Indeed, if the facts were not so well-established and so overwhelmingly numerous, it would appear incredible to most of us nowadays that the conception of “sacredness” or “consecration” could be honestly connected, in the mind of any people, with the above things and persons.
And yet it is obvious, when one sums up the whole matter, that though in cases Cieza de Leon may have been right in suggesting that religion was only brought in as a cloak and excuse for licentiousness, yet in the main this explanation does not suffice. There must have been considerably more at the back of it all than that: a strange conviction apparently, or superstition, if one likes to call it so, that unusual powers of divination and prophecy were to be found in homosexual folk, and those who adopted the said hybrid kind of life--a conviction moreover (or superstition) so rooted and persistent that it spread over the greater part of the world.
Is any explanation, we may ask, of this strange and anomalous belief possible? Probably a complete explanation, in the present state of our knowledge, is not possible. Yet some suggestions in that direction we may perhaps venture to give. Before doing so, however, it may be as well to dwell for a moment on the further and widely prevalent belief in the connection between homosexuality and sorcery.
II. As Wizard Or Witch
PERHAPS--as it is now generally considered that the belief in Magic preceded what we call religion, and that the wizard came in order of development before the priest--I ought to have placed the present chapter first; but for some reasons the order adopted seems the better. Anyhow it is certain that among primitive folk the prophet, the priest, the wizard, and the witch-doctor largely unite their functions, and are not easily distinguishable from one another; and therefore, from what has already been said, we may naturally expect to find an association between homosexuality and sorcery.
Westermarck (vol. i., p. 477) mentions the ancient Scandinavians as regarding passive homosexuals in the light of sorcerers; and refers (p. 484 note) to Thomas Falkner, who, in his Description of Patagonia (1775), p. 117, says that among the Patagonians “the wizards are of both sexes. The male wizards are obliged (as it were) to leave their sex, and to dress themselves in female apparel, and are not permitted to marry, though the female ones or witches may. They are generally chosen for this office when they are children, and a preference is always shown to those who at that early time of life discover an effeminate disposition. They are clothed very early in female attire, and presented with the drum and rattles belonging to the profession they are to follow.”
The following is an account given by Dawydow, the Russian traveller,[23] of the quite similar custom prevalent in his time (about 1800) among the Konyagas in the Alaska region: - “There are here (in the island of Kadiak) men with tatooed chins, who work only as women, who always live with the women-kind, and like the latter, have husbands;--not infrequently even two. Such men are called Achnutschik. They are not by any means despised, but, on the contrary, are respected in the settlements, and are for the most part wizards. The Konyaga, who possesses an Achnutschik instead of a wife, is even thought fortunate. When father or mother regard their son as feminine in his bearing they will often dedicate him in earliest childhood to the vocation of Achnutschik. Sometimes it will happen that the parents have in mind beforehand to have a daughter, and when they find themselves disappointed they make their new-born son an Achnutschik.”
Here we have the association between homosexuality and sorcery clearly indicated for the very extremes, South and North, of the American continent; and, as a matter of fact, and as appears from various other passages in the present work, the same association may be traced among countless tribes of the middle regions of the same continent, and all over the world. There was a legend current among the North American Indians at one time[24] about a Bardache, or man of this kind, who was shot at by an enraged warrior of his own tribe; but when the onlookers ran to the place where the transfixed man fell they found only an arrow sticking in a heap of stones. The man had disappeared!
With regard to the attribution of homosexuality also to female wizards, or witches, I believe that, rightly or wrongly, this was very common in Europe a few centuries ago. Leo Africanus (1492) in his description of Morocco [25] says, “The third kind of diviners are women-witches, which are affirmed to have familiarity with divels. Changing their voices they fain the divell to speak within them: then they which come to enquire ought with greate feare and trembling (to) aske these vile and abominable witches such questions as they mean to propound, and lastly, offering some fee unto the divell, they depart. But the wiser and honester sort of people call these women Sahacat, which in Latin signifieth Fricatrices, because they have a damnable custom to commit unlawful venerie among themselves, which I cannot express in any modester terms.” He then goes on to say that these witches, carnally desiring some of the young women who come to “enquire,” entrap them and corrupt them so far as actually to cause them in some cases to “desire the companie of those witches” (and to that end, he explains, deceive their husbands). Whether this is all true or not--and probably it is quite vulgarly exaggerated--it shows the kind of thing that was believed at that time about witches.
In some cases the adoption of the life of priest or sorcerer is accompanied by a change of dress (as we have seen), but this is by no means always so. Speaking of the Pelew Islanders, Dr. Frazer[26] attributes the adoption by the priests of female attire to the fact that “it often happens that a goddess chooses a man, not a woman, for her minister and inspired mouthpiece. When that is so, the favoured man is thenceforth regarded and treated as a woman.” And he continues - “This pretended change of sex under the inspiration of a female spirit perhaps explains a custom widely spread among savages, in accordance with which some men dress as women and act as women through life.”
This explanation is certainly not very convincing--though it is just possible that in certain cases of men of this kind in early times, the feminine part of their natures may have personified itself, and presented itself to them as a vision of a female spirit or goddess; and thus the explanation might be justified. But anyhow it should not be overlooked that the same impulse (for men to dress as women, and women to dress as men) perseveres to-day in quite a large percentage of our modern civilised populations; and whatever its explanations, the impulse is often enormously powerful, and its satisfaction a source of great delight. It must also not be overlooked, in dealing with this complex and difficult subject, that the mere fact of a person delighting to adopt the garb of the opposite sex does not in. itself prove that his or her love-tendency is abnormal--i.e., cross-dressing does not prove homosexuality. There are not a few cases of men in the present day (and presumably the same in past times) who love to dress as women and yet are perfectly normal in their sex-relations; and therefore too sweeping generalisations on this subject must be avoided.[27]
On the whole, however, cross-dressing must be taken as a general indication of, and a cognate phenomenon to, homosexuality; and its wide prevalence in early times, especially in connection with the priesthood, must give us much matter for thought. Dr. Frazer, in his Adonis, Attis, and Osiris, continuing the passage I have just quoted, says: - “These unsexed creatures often, perhaps generally, profess the arts of sorcery and healing, they communicate with spirits and are regarded sometimes with awe and sometimes with contempt, as beings of a higher or lower order than common folk. Often they are dedicated or trained to their vocation from childhood. Effeminate sorcerers or priests of this sort are found among the Sea Dyaks of Borneo, the Bugis of South Celebes, the Patagonians of South America. . . . In Madagascar we hear of effeminate men who wore female attire and acted as women, thinking thereby to do God service. In the kingdom of Congo there was a sacrificial priest who commonly dressed as a woman and gloried in the title of the grandmother.”
And Dr. Karsch, in his Uranismus bei den Natur: völkern, after enumerating the above and many other instances, says that among many or most of these tribes the main object of the cross-dressing seems to be something of a religious or mystical character, since the persons concerned are accounted as beings of a higher order, priests or sorcerers; but that fact does not stand in the way of the homosexual relationship, which certainly prevails in many cases.
An important point in all this matter, and one which on the one hand gives an air of sincerity to the phenomenon, and on the other may easily have connected it with magic and sorcery in the primitive mind, is the rapidity and decisiveness with which the sexual transformation sometimes seems to take place. This is indicated in Dr. Frazer’s just-quoted passage on the Pelew Islanders; and in such cases we seem to be witnessing a veritable metamorphosis, and cannot help wondering whether a real psychological or physiological transmutation may not be in progress. For though sometimes, as we have seen, children are brought up from an early age to play this exchanged or inverted part in life, yet often they take it up themselves, and cannot be persuaded to abandon it; and often they quite suddenly adopt it as young men (or women) or in mature age--as the result of some supposed dream or inspiration. Wied, lately quoted, says concerning the Bardaches: - “These generally assert that a dream or some high impulse has commanded them to adopt this state as their ‘medicine’ or salvation, and nothing then can turn them away from their purpose. Many a father has sought even by force to divert his child from this object, has reasoned with him at first, offered him fine weapons and masculine articles of dress in order to inspire him with a taste for manly occupations; and when this proved useless, has handled him sternly, punished and beaten him, yet all in vain.”[28]
John T. Irving, in his Indian Sketches (1835)--a description of the Pawnee and other American Indians-has a whole chapter (ch. xxii.) entitled “The Metamorphosis” and dealing with this subject. He there describes how among a group of female Indians occupied in drying shelled corn in the sun, he one day noticed what seemed a particularly tall and powerful woman--who, on enquiry, turned out to be a man. This man’s story was as follows. Once an Otoe brave of the highest renown, he on one occasion, after a desperate fight with the Osages, returned home, and refusing to speak to anyone, threw himself on his bed for the night. In the morning he rose up an altered man. “He collected his family round him, and informed them that the Great Spirit had visited him in a dream, and had told him he had now reached the zenith of his reputation; that no voice had more weight in the Council; no arm was heavier in battle. But that he must thenceforth relinquish all claim to the rank of a warrior and assume the dress and avocations of a female.” His friends heard him in sorrow, but did not attempt to dissuade him, “for they listened to the communications of the deity with a veneration equal to his own.” So he snapped his bow in twain, buried his tomahawk and rifle, washed off his war paint, discarded the eagle plume from his scalp-lock, and ceased to be numbered among the warriors, relinquishing all “for the lowly and servile duties of a female.”
Years had elapsed, says the author, since that act of renunciation, but the man had kept to his resolve.
These strange changes, induced in childhood, or spontaneously adopted in youth, maturity, and even old age, have been observed amongst almost all the North American Indian tribes. Wied mentions the Sauks, Foxes, Mandans, Crows, Blackfeet, Dakotas, Assimboins, and others. And their connection with the Moon seems to be frequently believed in. W. H. Keating, in his Expedition to Lake Winnipeck (2 vols., 1824), says that the Sun among the Winnebagos is held to be propitious to man; but “the Moon, on the contrary, they held to be inhabited by an adverse female deity, whose delight is to cross man in all his pursuits. If, during their sleep, this deity should present herself to them in their dreams, the Indians consider it enjoined on them by duty to become cinædi; and they ever after assume the female garb. It is not impossible (continues Keating) that this may have been the source of the numerous stories of hermaphrodites related by all the old writers on America.”
Whatever may be the truth about the connection between these strange changes of sexual habit and visionary appearances of the deities (a subject on which I shall touch again later on), we cannot help seeing, as I say, that the fervent belief in such connection is a testimony to the sincerity and actuality of the transformations, as well as a partial explanation of why sorcerous and miraculous powers were credited to the transformed persons. At any rate, the total mass of facts connecting homosexualism in general with religion and divination, or with unusual psychic powers, and on the same lines as those already presented in this and the preceding chapter, is enormously large; and we need delay no longer on their further accumulation. We may, however, venture to say a few words in possible explanation of the connection.
Dr. Iwan Bloch, in his monumental work, Die Prostitution,[29] leans to the general explanation that homosexuality, just on account of its strange and inexplicable character, was by primitive people accounted as something divine and miraculous, and the homosexual man or woman therefore credited with supernatural powers. He says (vol. i., p. 101), “This riddle, which despite all our efforts, present-day science has not yet satisfactorily solved, must to the primitive intelligence have appeared even more inexplicable than to us; and a man born with the inclination towards his own sex must have been regarded as something extraordinary, as one of those strange freaks of Nature which among Primitives are so easily accounted divine marvels and honored as such. The by no means scanty supply of ethnological facts on this subject which we possess confirms the above view, and shows in what odour of sanctity homosexual individuals have often stood among Nature-folk-for which reason they frequently played an important part in religious rituals and festivals.”
Bloch also quotes a theory of Adolf Bastian, who, in his great work, Der Mensch in der Geschichte, supposes that the priests among early peoples, as representatives of the bisexual principle in Nature, encouraged homosexual rites in the temples on the same footing as heterosexual rites. “The men,” says Bastian, “prayed to the active powers of Nature, and the women, in privacy and retirement, to the feminine powers; while the priests, who had to satisfy the demands of both parties, learned the idea of sex-changes from the Moon, and served the masculine gods in masculine attire, and the goddesses in feminine garments, or set up images of a bearded Venus and of a Herkules spinning at the wheel.”
Neither of these explanations seems to me to be quite adequate. That of Bloch is hardly sufficient; for though it is true that freaks of Nature are often regarded with superstitious awe by savages, that fact does not quite suffice to explain the world-wide attribution of magic powers to homosexuals, nor the systematic adoption of the services of such folk in the temples. The theory of Bastian, on the other band, is quite opposed to that of Bloch, for it pre-supposes a very wide original prevalence of homosexuality in the human race, which was only preserved (and not instituted) by the priests in the tradition of the religious rituals; and therefore it cuts away the speculation that the homosexual man was divinised on account of his rarity. Moreover, the theory of Bastian suffers from the fact that the supposed wide prevalence of bisexuality in aboriginal times is by no means proved, or indeed easily provable--although, of course, it may have existed. However, on the subject of bisexuality I shall touch in a later chapter.
For myself, I think that there are two quite possible and not unreasonable theories on the whole matter. The first and most important is that there really is a connection between the homosexual temperament and divinatory or unusual psychic powers; the second is (that there is no such particular connection, but) that the idea of sorcery or witchcraft naturally and commonly springs up round the ceremonials of an old religion or morality when that religion is being superseded by a new one. This is, of course, a well-recognised fact. The gods of one religion become the devils of its successor; the poetic rites of one age become the black magic of the next. But in the case of the primitive religions of the earth their ceremonials were, without doubt, very largely sexual, and even homosexual. Consequently, when new religious developments set in, the homosexual rites, which were most foreign to the later religionists and most disturbing to their ideas, associated themselves most strongly with the notion of sorcery and occult powers.
For myself I am inclined to accept both explanations, and--leaving out, of course, the clause in brackets in the second--to combine them. I think there is an organic connection between the homosexual temperament and unusual psychic or divinatory powers; but I think also that the causes mentioned in the second explanation have in many cases led to an exaggerated belief in such connection, and have given it a sorcerous or demonic aspect.
To take the second point first. just as, according to Darwin, the sharpest rivalry occurs between a species and the closely allied species from which it has sprung, so in any religion there is the fiercest theological hatred against the form which has immediately preceded it. Early Christianity could never say enough against the Pagan cults of the old world (partly for the very reason that it embodied so much of their ceremonial and was in many respects their lineal descendant). They were the work and inspiration of the devil. Their Eucharists and baptismal rites and initiations--so strangely and diabolically similar to the Christian rites--were sheer black magic; their belief in the sacredness of sex mere filthiness. Similarly the early Protestants could never say malignant things enough against the Roman Catholics; or the Secularists in their turn against the Protestants. In all these cases there is an element of fear--fear because the thing supposed to have been left behind lies after all so close, and is always waiting to reassert itself--and this fear invests the hated symbol or person with a halo of devilish potency. Think, for instance, what sinister and magical powers and influence have been commonly ascribed to the Roman Catholic priests in the ordinary Protestant parlours and circles!
It is easy, therefore, to understand that when the Jews established their worship of Jehovah as a great reaction against the primitive nature-cults of Syria--and in that way to become in time the germ of Christianity--the first thing they did was to denounce the priests and satellites of Baal-Peor and Ashtoreth as wizards and sorcerers, and wielders of devilish faculties. These cults were frankly sexual--probably the most intimate meaning of them, as religions, being the glory and sacredness of sex; but the Jews (like the later Christians) blinding themselves to this aspect, were constrained to see in sex only filthiness, and in its religious devotees persons in league with Beelzebub and the powers of darkness. And, of course, the homosexual elements in these cults, being the most foreign to the new religion, stood out as the most sorcerous and the most magical part of them. Westermarck points out (“Moral Ideas,” ii. 489) that the Mediaeval Christianity constantly associated homosexuality with heresy--to such a degree in fact that the French word herite or heretique was sometimes used in both connections; and that bougre or Bulgarian was commonly used in both, though to begin with it only denoted a sect of religious heretics who came from Bulgaria. And he thinks that the violent reprobation and punishment of homosexuality arose more from its connection in the general mind with heresy than from direct aversion in the matter--more in fact from religious motives than from secular ones.
But connecting with all this, we must not neglect the theory so ably worked out by Prof. Karl Pearson among others--namely that the primitive religions were not only sexual in character but that they were largely founded on an early matriarchal order of society, in which women had the predominant sway--descent being traced through them, and tribal affairs largely managed by them, and in which the chief deities were goddesses, and the priests and prophets mainly females. Exactly how far such an order of society really extended in the past is apparently a doubtful question; but that there are distinct traces of such matriarchal institutions in certain localities and among some peoples seems to be quite established. Karl Pearson, assuming the real prevalence of these institutions in early times points out, reasonably enough, that when Christianity became fairly established matriarchal rites and festivals, lingering on in out-of-the-way places and among the peasantry, would at once be interpreted as being devilish and sorcerous in character, and the women (formerly priestesses) who conducted them and perhaps recited snatches of ancient half-forgotten rituals, would be accounted witches. “We have, therefore,” he says,[30] ”to look upon the witch as essentially the degraded form of the old priestess, cunning in the knowledge of herbs and medicine, jealous of the rites of the goddess she serves, and preserving in spells and incantations such wisdom as early civilisation possessed.” This civilisation, he explains, included the “observing of times and seasons,” the knowledge of weather-lore, the invention of the broom, the distaff, the cauldron, the pitchfork, the domestication of the goat, the pig, the cock and the hen, and so forth-all which things became symbols of the witch in later times, simply because originally they were the inventions of woman and the insignia of her office, and so the religious symbols of the Mother-goddess and her cult.
The connection of all this with homosexual customs is not at once clear; but it has been suggested --though I am not sure that Karl Pearson himself supports this--that the primitive religions of the Matriarchate may have ultimately led to men-priests dressing in female attire. For when the matriarchal days were passing away, and men were beginning to assert their predominance, it still may have happened that the old religious customs lingering on may have induced men to simulate the part of women and to dress as priestesses, or at least have afforded them an excuse for so doing.[31] In this way it seems just possible that the pendulum-swing of society from the matriarchate to the patriarchate may have been accompanied by some degree of crasis and confusion between the functions of the sexes, homosexual customs and tendencies may have come to the fore, and the connection of homosexuality with the priesthood may seem to be accounted for.
This explanation, however, though it certainly has a claim to be mentioned, seems to me too risky and insecure for very much stress to be laid upon it. In the first place the extent and prevalence of the matriarchal order of society is a matter still very much disputed, and to assume that at any early period of human history the same was practically universal would be unjustified. In the second place, granting the existence of the matriarchal order and its transmutation into the patriarchal, the connection of this change with the development of homosexual customs is still only a speculation and a theory, supported by little direct evidence. On the other hand, the facts to be explained--namely, the connection of homosexuality with priesthood and divination--seem to be world-wide and universal. Therefore, though we admit that the causes mentioned--namely the attribution of magical qualities to old religious rites, and the introduction of feminine inversions and disguises through the old matriarchal custom--may account in part for the facts, and in particular may in certain localities have given them a devilish or sorcerous complexion, yet I think we must look deeper for the root-explanations of the whole matter, and consider whether there may not be some fundamental causes in human nature itself.
III. As Inventors Of The Arts And Crafts
I HAVE already said that I think there is an original connection of some kind between homosexuality and divination; but in saying this, of course, I do not mean that everywhere and always the one is associated with the other, or that the relationship between the two is extremely well marked; but I contend that a connection can be traced and that on a priori grounds its existence is quite probable.
And first, with regard to actual observation of such a connection, the fact of the widespread belief in it, which I have already noted as existing among the primitive tribes of the earth, and their founding of all sorts of customs on that belief, must count for something. Certainly the mere existence of a widespread belief among early and superstitious peoples--as for instance that an eclipse is caused by a dragon swallowing the sun--does not prove its truth; but in the case we are considering the matter is well within the range of ordinary observation, and the constant connection between the choupan and the angakok, the ke’yev and the shaman, the berdashe and the witch-doctor, the ganymede and the temple-priest, and their correspondences all over the world, the basir among the Dyaks, the boy-priests in the temples of Peru, the same in the Buddhist temples of Ceylon, Burma and China--all these cases seem to point to some underlying fact, of the fitness or adaptation of the invert for priestly or divinatory functions. And though the tendency already alluded to, of a later religion to ascribe devilish potency to earlier cults, must certainly in many instances shed a sinister or sorcerous glamour over the invert, yet this exaggeration need not blind us to the existence of a residual fact behind it; and anyhow to a great many of the cases just mentioned it does not apply at all, since in them the question of one religion superseding another does not enter.
To come to more recent times, the frequency with which accusations of homosexuality have been launched against the religious orders and monks of the Catholic Church. the Knights Templars, and even the ordinary priests and clerics, must give us pause. Nor need we overlook the fact that in Protestant Britain the curate and the parson quite often appear to belong to some “third sex” which is neither wholly masculine nor wholly feminine!
Granting, then, that the connection in question is to a certain degree indicated by the anthropological facts which we already possess--is there, we may ask, any rational ground for expecting this connection a priori and from psychological considerations? I think there is.
In the first place all science now compels us to admit the existence of the homosexual temperament as a fact of human nature, and an important fact; and not only so, but to perceive that it is widely spread among the various races of the earth, and extends back to the earliest times of which we have anything like historical knowledge. We can no longer treat it as a mere local and negligible freak, or put it in the category of a sinful and criminal disposition to be stamped out at all costs. We feel that it must have some real significance. The question is what that may be. The following is a suggestion that may cover part of the ground, though not, I think, the whole.
In the primitive societies the men (the quite normal men) are the warriors and hunters. These are their exclusive occupations. The women (the normal women) attend to domestic work and agriculture, and their days are consumed in those labors. But in the evolution of society there are many more functions to be represented than those simple ones just mentioned. And we may almost think that if it had not been for the emergence of intermediate types--the more or less feminine, man and similarly the more or less masculine woman--social life might never have advanced beyond these primitive phases. But when the man came along who did not want to fight--who perhaps was more inclined to run away--and who did not particularly care about hunting, he necessarily discovered some other interest and occupation--composing songs or observing the qualities of herbs or the processions of the stars. Similarly with the woman who did not care about house-work and child-rearing. The non-warlike men and the non-domestic women, in short, sought new outlets for their energies. They sought different occupations from those of the quite ordinary man and woman--as in fact they do to-day; and so they became the initiators of new activities. They became students of life and nature, inventors and teachers of arts and crafts, or wizards (as they would be considered) and sorcerers; they became diviners and seers, or revealers of the gods and religion; they became medicine-men and healers, prophets and prophetesses; and so ultimately laid the foundation of the priesthood, and of science, literature and art. Thus--on this view, and as might not unreasonably be expected--it was primarily a variation in the intimate sex-nature of the human being which led to these important differentiations in his social life and external activities.
In various ways we can see the likelihood of this thesis, and the probability of the intermediate man or woman becoming a forward force in human evolution. In the first place, as just mentioned, not wholly belonging to either of the two great progenitive branches of the human race, his nature would not find complete satisfaction in the activities of either branch, and he would necessarily create a new sphere of some kind for himself. Secondly, finding himself different from the great majority, sought after by some and despised by others, now an object of contumely and now an object of love and admiration, he would be forced to think. His mind turned inwards on himself would be forced to tackle the problem of his own nature, and afterwards the problem of the world and of outer nature. He would become one of the first thinkers, dreamers, discoverers. Thirdly, some of the Intermediates (though certainly not all) combining the emotionality of the feminine with the practicality of the masculine, and many other qualities and powers of both sexes, as well as much of their experience, would undoubtedly be greatly superior in ability to the rest of their, tribe, and making forward progress in the world of thought and imagination would become inventors, teachers, musicians, medicine-men and priests; while their early science and art (for such it would be)--prediction of rain, determination of seasons, observation of stars, study of herbs, creation of chants and songs, rude drawings, and so forth-would be accounted quite magical and divinatory.
With regard to the early beginnings of poetry and music, we know that dancing had an important place; and there is an interesting passage in Leguével de Lacombe’s Voyage d Madagascar,[32] (vol. L, pp. 97, 98), which indicates the connection of these arts, among the Tsecats of Madagascar, with sexual variation. “Dancers form a distinct class in Madagascar, though they are not very numerous. They have their own manners and customs, and live apart; they do not marry, and even affect dislike for women--although they wear the dress of the latter and imitate their voice, gestures, and general habits. They wear large earrings of gold or silver, necklaces of coral or coloured beads, and bracelets of silver; they carefully extract the hair of their beards, and in short play the part of women so well that one is often deceived. For the rest these dancers have simple manners, and are very sober in their habits; they are continually on the move, and are well accepted wherever they go; sometimes, indeed, they receive considerable presents. I have seen chiefs who have been amused by them for some days make them a present, on their departure, of two or three slaves. They are the poets or the bards of the island, and they improvise rhapsodies in praise of those who are generous to them.”
Very similar customs connecting the wandering life of dancers, actors, and singers with a certain amount of inversion of temperament, are known to have existed among that strange and remarkable people, the Areoi of Polynesia: of whom Win. Ellis, the missionary already quoted, says that they were honoured as gods, and were supposed to be inspired by the gods to become members of the Areoi society; also that their initiations began by submission to service and to various ordeals, and ended by a ceremonial in which the candidate snatched and appropriated the cloth worn by the chief woman present!
In all this--whether relating to primitive science or primitive art--there would, of course, really be nothing miraculous. It is easy to see that certain individuals, whose interests or abilities were turned in special or unusual directions, would seem to the general herd as having supernatural intuitions or powers. The “rain-maker’s” predictions in South Africa to-day may date from no more weather lore than those of a British farmer; but to his tribe he appears a magician. Magic and early science have almost everywhere been interchangeable terms. The intermediate or Uranian man, from this point of view, would be simply an ordinary member of the tribe who from his double temperament would be rather more observant and acute and originative than the rest. There is, however, another point of view from which he might be credited with something distinctly additional in the way of faculty.
For, in the fourth place, I believe that at this stage an element of what might really be called divination would come in. I believe that the blending of the masculine and feminine temperaments would in some of these cases produce persons whose perceptions would be so subtle and complex and rapid as to come under the head of genius, persons of intuitive mind who would perceive things without knowing how, and follow far concatenations of causes and events without concerning themselves about the why--diviners and prophets in a very real sense. And these persons-whether they prophesied downfall or disaster, or whether they urged their people onward to conquest and victory, or whether by acute combinations of observation and experience they caught at the healing properties of herbs or determined the starry influences on the seasons and the crops--in almost all cases would acquire and did acquire a strange reputation for sanctity and divinity--arising partly perhaps out of the homosexual taboo, but also out of their real possession and command of a double-engine psychic power.
The double life and nature certainly, in many cases of inverts observed to-day, seems to give to them an extraordinary humanity and sympathy, together with a remarkable power of dealing with human beings. It may possibly also point to a further degree of evolution than usually attained, and a higher order of consciousness, very imperfectly realised, of course, but indicated. This interaction in fact, between the masculine and the feminine, this mutual illumination of logic and intuition, this combination of action and meditation, may not only raise and increase the power of each of these faculties, but it may give the mind a new quality, and a new power of perception corresponding to the blending of subject and object in consciousness. It may possibly lead to the development of that third order of perception which has been called the cosmic consciousness, and which may also be termed divination. “He who knows the masculine,” says Lao-tsze, “and at the same time keeps to the feminine, will be the whole world’s channel. Eternal virtue will not depart from him, and he will return again to the state of an infant.” To the state of an infant!--that is, he will become undifferentiated from Nature, who is his mother, and who will lend him all her faculties.
It is not, of course, to be supposed that the witchdoctors and diviners of barbarian tribes have in general reached to the high order of development just described, yet it is noticeable, in the slow evolution of society, how often the late and high developments have been indicated in the germ in primitive stages; and it may be so in this case. Very interesting in this connection is the passage already quoted (page 19) from Elie Reclus about the initiations of the Esquimaux angakok and the appearance to him of his own Genius or Double from the world beyond, for almost exactly the same thing is supposed to take place in the initiation of the religious yogi in India--except that the god in this latter case appears to the pupil in the form of his teacher or guru. And how often in the history of the Christian saints has the divinity in the form of Jesus or Mary appeared to the strenuous devotee, apparently as the culminating result of his intense effort and aspiration, and of the opening out of a new plane of perception in his mind! It may be that with every great onward push of the growing soul, and every great crisis in which as it were a sheath or a husk falls away from the expanding bud, something in the nature of a metamorphosis does really take place; and the new order, the new revelation, the new form of life, is seen for a moment as a Vision in glorious state of a divine being within.[33]
IV. Hermaphrodism Among Gods And Mortals
IN chapter ii. above, reference is made by one of the writers quoted to “the numerous stories of hermaphrodites related by all the old writers on America.” That there are such numerous stories is quite correct. Jacobus Le Moyne, who travelled as artist with a French Expedition to Florida in 1564, left some very interesting drawings[34] representing the Indians of that region and their customs; and among them one representing the “Hermaphrodites”--tall and powerful men, beardless, but with long and abundant hair, and naked except for a loin-cloth, engaged in carrying wounded or dying fellow-Indians on their backs or on litters to a place of safety. He says of them that in Florida such folk of double nature are frequent, and that being robust and powerful, they are made use of in the place of animals for the carrying of burdens. For when their chiefs go to war the hermaphrodites carry the food; and when any of the tribe die of wounds or disease they construct litters . . . of wood and rushes . . . and so carry the dead to the place of burial. And indeed those who are stricken with any infectious disease are borne by the hermaphrodites to certain appointed places, and nursed and cared for by them, until they may be restored to full health.”
Similar stories are told by Charlevoix, [35] de Pauw,[36] and others; and one seems to get a glimpse in them of an intermediate class of human beings who made themselves useful to the community not only by their muscular strength, but by their ability and willingness to act as nurses and attendants on the sick and dying.
It is needless, of course, to say that these were not hermaphrodites in the strict sense of the term--i.e., human beings uniting in one person the functions both of male and female--since such beings do practically not exist. But it is evident that they were intermediate types--in the sense of being men with much of the psychologic character of women, or in some cases women with the mentality of men; and the early travellers, who had less concrete and reliable information on such subjects than we have, and who were already prepossessed by the belief in the prevalence of hermaphroditism, leapt easily to the conclusion that these strange beings were indeed of that nature. De Pauw, indeed, just mentioned, positively refuses to believe in the explanation that they were men dressed as women, and insists that they were hermaphrodites!
In 1889, a certain Dr. A. B. Holder, anxious to settle positively the existence or non-existence of hermaphrodites, made some investigations among the Crow-Indians of Montana--among whom the Bardaches were called “Boté.”[37] And Dr. Karsch, summarising his report, says [38]: - “This word, bo-té, means literally ‘not man, not woman.’ A corresponding Tulalip-word which the Indians of the Washington region make use of is, according to Holder, ‘burdash,’ which means ‘half man, half woman’--and that without necessarily implying any anomalous structure of the sex-organs. . . The Crow-tribe, in 1889, included five such Boté, and possessed about the same number before. They form a class in every tribe, are well-known to each other, and knit friendly relations with their likes in other tribes, so that they become well acquainted with the Uranian relationships also in the neighbour tribes. They wear female attire, part their hair in the middle, and plait it in womanly style; they possess or cultivate feminine voices and gestures, and live continually in association with the women, just as if they belonged to that sex. All the same their voices, features, and figure never lose their masculine quality so completely as to make it hard for a careful observer to distinguish. a Boté from a woman. Such a Boté among the: Crows carried on women’s work, like sweeping, scrubbing, dish-washing, with such neatness and willingness that he would often obtain employment among the white folk. Usually the feminine attire is adopted in childhood, and the corresponding ways of life at an early age, but his special calling is not exercised by the Boté till the age of puberty. A young scholar of an educational establishment--a boys’ school in an Indian Agency--was often caught dressing himself in secret in women’s clothes; and although punished on each occasion, he nevertheless, after leaving school, transformed himself into a Boté--to which calling he has ever since remained true. A certain Boté, well accredited among the Crow-tribe, who belonged to the scouting-party of Dr. Holder, was a Dakota Indian; he is described as a splendidly built young man of pleasing features, perfect health, brisk alertness, and the happiest disposition. Holder attached him to his own service, and finally persuaded him--though only after much unwillingness on his part--to allow himself to be personally examined.” The result of the examination was to prove him to be physically a complete man--and, moreover, an exceedingly modest one!
The Père Lafitau, whom I have quoted before and who was a keen observer and a broad-minded man, says, in one passage of his Sauvages Américains: “The spectacle of the men disguised as women surprised the Europeans who first landed in America. And, as they did not at all understand the motives of this sort of metamorphosis, they concluded that these were folk in whom the two sexes were conjoined: as a matter of fact our old records always term them hermaphrodites.” He goes on to say that though the spirit of religion which made these men embrace this mode of life caused them to be regarded as extraordinary beings, yet the suspicions which the Europeans entertained concerning them took such hold upon the latter “that they invented every possible charge against them, and these imaginations inflamed the zeal of Vasco Nugnes de Vabra, the Spanish captain who first discovered the Southern Sea (la mer du Sud), to such an extent that he destroyed numbers of them by letting loose upon them those savage dogs, of whom his compatriots indeed made use for the purpose of exterminating a large proportion of the Indians.”
On the cruelties of the Spanish conquerors among the Indian tribes--only paralleled apparently by those of modern Commercialism among the same--we need not dwell. What interests us here is the evidence of the wide-spread belief in hermaphroditism current among the early European travellers. That a similar belief has ruled also among most primitive peoples is evident from a consideration of their gods. Why it should so have ruled is a question which I shall touch on towards the conclusion of this chapter. The whole matter, anyhow, belongs to the subjects we are discussing in this book. For clearly bisexuality links on to homosexuality, and the fact that this characteristic was ascribed to the gods suggests that in the popular mind it must have played a profound and important part in human life. I will, therefore, in concluding this portion of the book, give some instances of this divine bisexuality.
Brahm, in the Hindu mythology, is often represented as two-sexed. Originally he was the sole Being. But, “delighting not to be alone he wished for the existence of another, and at once he became such, as male and female embraced (united). He caused this his one self to fall in twain.”[39] Siva, also, the most popular of the Hindu divinities, is originally bi-sexual. In the interior of the great rockhewn Temple at Elephanta the career of Siva is carved in successive panels. And on the first he appears as a complete full-length human being conjoining the two sexes in one--the left side of the figure (which represents the female portion) projecting into a huge breast and hip, while the right side is man-like in outline, and in the centre (though now much defaced) the organs of both sexes. In the second panel, however, his evolution or differentiation is complete, and he is portrayed as complete male with his consort Sakti or Parvati standing as perfect female beside him.[40] There are many such illustrations in Hindu literature and art, representing the gods in their double or bi-sexual role--e.g., as Brahma Ardhanarisa, Siva Ardhanarisa (half male and half female).[41] And these again are interesting in connection with the account of Elohim in the 1st chapter of Genesis, and the supposition that he was such an androgynous deity. For we find (v. 27) that “Elohim created man in his own image, in the image of Elohim created he him, male and female created he them.” And many commentators have maintained that this not only meant that the first man was hermaphrodite, but that the Creator also was of that nature. In the Midrasch we find that Rabbi Samuel-bar-Nachman said that “Adam, when God had created him, was a man-woman (androgyne);” and the great and learned Maimonides supported this, saying that “Adam and Eve were created together, conjoined by their backs, but God divided this double being, and taking one half (Eve), gave her to the other half (Adam) for a mate.” And the Rabbi Manasseh-ben-Israel, following this up, explained that when “God took one of Adam’s ribs to make Eve with,” it should rather be rendered “one of his sides”--that is, that he divided the double Adam, and one half was Eve.[42]
In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (I Adhyaya, 4th Brahmana) the evolution of Brahm is thus described it[43] - “In the beginning of this [world] was Self alone, in the shape of a person. . . . But he felt no delight. . . . He wished for a second. He was so large as man and wife together [i.e., he included male and female]. He then made this his Self to fall in two; and thence arose husband and wife. Therefore, Yagnavalkya said: We two are thus (each of us) like half a shell [or as some translate, like a split pea].” The singular resemblance of this account to what has been said above about the creation of Adam certainly suggests the idea that Jehovah, like Brahm (and like Baal and other Syrian gods), was conceived of as double-sexed, and that primitive man was also conceived as of like nature. The author (Ralston Skinner) of The Source of Measures says (p. 159) “The two words of which Jehovah is composed make up the original idea of male-female of the birth-originator. For the Hebrew letter Jod (or J) was the membrum virile, and Hovah was Eve, the mother of all living, or the procreatrix Earth and Nature.”[44]
The tradition that mankind was anciently hermaphrodite is world-old. It is referred to in Plato’s Banquet, where Aristophanes says: - “Anciently the nature of mankind was not the same as now, but different. For at first there were three sexes of human beings, not two only, namely male and female, as at present, but a third besides, common to both the others--of which the name remains, though the sex itself has vanished. For the androgynous sex then existed, both male and female; but now it only exists as a name of reproach.” He then describes how all these three sorts of human beings were originally double, and conjoined (as above) back to back; until Jupiter, jealous of his supremacy, divided them vertically “as people cut apples before they preserve them, or as they cut eggs with hairs”--after which, of course, these divided and imperfect folk ran about over the earth, ever seeking their lost halves, to be joined to them again.
I have mentioned the Syrian Baal as being sometimes represented as double-sexed (apparently in combination with Astarte). In the Septuagint (Hos. ii. 8, and Zeph. i. 4) he is called ἡ Baal (feminine) and Arnobius tells us that his worshippers invoked him thus [45] ”Hear us, Baal! whether thou be a god or goddess.” Similarly Bel and other Babylonian gods were often represented as androgyne.[46] Mithras among the Persians is spoken of by the Christian controversialist Firmicus as two-sexed, and by Herodotus (Bk. i., c. 131) as identified with a goddess, while there are innumerable Mithraic monuments on which appear the symbols of two deities, male and female combined.[47] Even Venus or Aphrodite was sometimes worshipped in the double form. “In Cyprus,” says Dr. Frazer in his Adonis, etc. (p. 432, note), “there was a bearded and masculine image of Venus (probably Astarte) in female attire: according to Philochorus the deity thus represented was the moon, and sacrifices were offered to him or her by men clad as women, and by women clad as men (see Macrobius Saturn iii. 7, 2).” This bearded female deity is sometimes also spoken of as Aphroditus, or as Venus Mylitta. Richard Burton says [48]: - “The Phoenicians spread their androgynic worship over Greece. We find the consecrated servants and votaries of Corinthian Aphrodite called Hierodouloi (Strabo, viii. 6), who aided the 10,000 courtesans in gracing the Venus-temple. . . . One of the headquarters of the cult was Cyprus, where, as Servius relates (Ad. Aen. ii. 632), stood the simulacre of a bearded Aphrodite with feminine body and costume, sceptred and mitred like a man. The sexes when worshiping it exchanged habits, and here the virginity was offered in sacrifice.”
The worship of this bearded goddess was mainly in Syria and Cyprus. But in Egypt also a representation of a bearded Isis has been found,--with infant Horus in her lap;[49] while again there are a number of representations (from papyri) of the goddess Neith in androgyne form, with a male member (erected). And again, curiously enough, the Norse Freya, or Friga, corresponding to Venus, was similarly figured. Dr. von Römer says: [50] - “just as the Greeks had their Aphroditos as well as Aphrodite so the Scandinavians had their Friggo as well as their Friga. This divinity, too, was androgyne. Friga, to whom the sixth day of the week was dedicated, was sometimes thought of as hermaphrodite. She was represented as having the members of both sexes, standing by a column with a sword in her right hand, and in her left a bow.”
In the Orphic hymns we have:--
“Zeus was the first of all, Zeus last, the lord of the lightning;
Zeus was the head, the middle, from him all things were created;
Zeus was Man, and again Zeus was the Virgin Eternal.”
And in another passage, speaking of Adonis:--
“Hear me, who pray to thee, hear me O many-named and best of deities,
Thou, with thy gracious hair . . . both maiden and youth, Adonis.”
Again, with regard to the latter, Ptolemaeus Hephaestius (according to Photius) writes: - “They say that the androgyne Adonis fulfilled the part of a man for Aphrodite, but for Apollo the part of a wife.”[51]
Dionysus, one of the most remarkable figures in the Greek Mythology, is frequently represented as androgyne. Euripides in his Bacchae calls him “feminine-formed” (Θηλύμορφος) or thelumorphos, and the Orphic hymns “double-sexed” (διφύης) or diphues; and Aristides in his discourse on Dionysus says: - “Thus the God is both male and female. His form corresponds to his nature, since everywhere in himself he is like a double being; for among young men he is a maiden, and among maidens a young man, and among men a beardless youth overflowing with vitality.” In the museum at Naples there is a very fine sculptured head of Dionysus, which though bearded has a very feminine expression, and is remindful of the traditional head of Christ. “In legend and art,” says Dr. Frazer,[52] ”there are clear traces of an effeminate Dionysus, and in some of his rites and processions men wore female attire. Similar things are reported of Bacchus, who was, of course, another form of Dionysus. Even Hercules, that most masculine figure, was said to have dressed as a woman for three years, during which he was the slave of Omphale, queen of Lydia. “If we suppose,” says Dr. Frazer, [53] “ that queen Omphale, like queen Semiramis, was nothing but the great Asiatic goddess, or one of her Avatars, it becomes probable that the story of the womanish Hercules of Lydia preserves a reminiscence of a line or college of effeminate priests who, like the eunuch priests of the Syrian goddess, dressed as women in imitation of their goddess, and were supposed to be inspired by her. The probability is increased by the practice of the priests of Heracles at Antimachia in Cos, who, as we have just seen, actually wore female attire when they were engaged in their sacred duties. Similarly at the vernal mysteries of Hercules in Rome the men were draped in the garments of women.”
Such instances could be rather indefinitely multiplied. Apollo is generally represented with a feminine--sometimes with an extremely feminine--bust and figure. The great hero Achilles passed his youth among women, and in female disguise. Every one knows the recumbent marble Hermaphrodite in the Louvre. There are also in the same collection two or three elegant bronzes of Aphrodite-like female figures in the standing position--but of masculine sex. What is the explanation of all this?
It is evident that the conception of a double sex, or of a sex combining the characters of male and female, haunted the minds of early peoples. Yet we have no reason for supposing that such a combination, in any complete and literal sense, ever existed. Modern physiological investigation has never produced a single case of a human being furnished with the complete organs of both sexes, and capable of fulfilling the functions of both. And the unfortunate malformations which do exist in this direction are too obviously abortive and exceptional to admit of their being generalised or exalted into any kind of norm or ideal. All we can say is that--though in the literal sense no double forms exist--certainly a. vast number of intermediate forms of male and female are actually found, which are double in the sense that the complete organs of one sex are conjoined with some or nearly all of the (secondary) characters of the other sex; and that we have every reason to believe that these intermediate types have existed in considerable numbers from the remotest antiquity. That being so, it is possible that the observation or influence of these intermediate types led to a tentative and confused idealisation of a double type.
Anyhow the fact remains--that these idealisations of the double type are so numerous. And it is interesting to notice that while they begin in early times with being merely grotesque and symbolical, they end in the later periods by becoming artistic and gracious and approximated to the real and actual. The Indian Siva, with his right side masculine and his left side feminine, is in no way beautiful or attractive; any more than Brahma with twenty arms and twenty legs. And the same may be said of the bearded Egyptian Isis or the bearded Syrian Aphrodite. These were only rude and inartistic methods of conveying an idea. The later spirit, however, found a better way of expression. It took its cue from the variations of type to be seen every day in the actual world; and instead of representing the Persian Mithra as a two-sexed monster, it made him a young man, but of very feminine outline. The same with the Greek Apollo; while on the other hand, the female who is verging toward the male type is represented by Artemis or even by the Amazons.
It may be said:--we can understand this representation of intermediate forms from actual life, but we do not see why such mingling of the sexes should be ascribed to the gods, unless it might be from a merely fanciful tendency to personify the two great powers of nature in one being--in which case it is strange that the tendency should have been so universal. To this we may reply that probably the reason or reasons for this tendency must be accounted quite deep-rooted and anything but fanciful. One reason, it seems to me, is the psychological fact that in the deeps of human nature (as represented by Brahm and Siva in the Hindu philosophy, by Zeus in the Orphic Hymns, by Mithra in the Zend-avesta, etc.) the sex-temperament is undifferentiated; [54] and it is only in its later and more external and partial manifestations that it branches decidedly into male and female; and that, therefore, in endeavoring through religion to represent the root facts of life, there was always a tendency to cultivate and honor hermaphroditism, and to ascribe some degree of this quality to heroes and divinities. The other possible reason is that as a matter of fact the great leaders and heroes did often exhibit this blending of masculine and feminine qualities and habits in their actual lives, and that therefore at some later period, when exalted to divinities, this blending of qualities was strongly ascribed to them and was celebrated in the rites and ceremonies of their religion and their temples. The feminine traits in genius (as in a Shelley or a Byron) are well marked in the present day. We have only to go back to the Persian Bâb of the last century[55] or to a St. Francis or even to a Jesus of Nazareth, to find the same traits present in founders and leaders of religious movements in historical times. And it becomes easy to suppose the same again of those early figures--who once probably were men--those Apollos, Buddhas, Dionysus, Osiris, and so forth--to suppose that they too were somewhat bi-sexual in temperament, and that it was really largely owing to that fact that they were endowed with far-reaching powers and became leaders of mankind. In either case--whichever reason is adopted--it corroborates the general thesis and argument of this paper.
V. Military Comradeship Among The Dorian Greeks
IN the preceding chapters, especially the earlier ones, we have seen how, among a vast number of primitive peoples, the Uranian temperament and tendency has contributed to the cultivation of divination and prophecy, religious ceremonial, song, dance, literature, medicine, and so forth. We inferred a priori that the man of those days who experienced a distaste for warfare and the chase would not unnaturally discover other fields of activity, and develop these milder arts and crafts of life, and we found that as a matter of fact this commonly happened. Such a man was no doubt in some cases “effeminate,” as we should say: but where not exactly that, he was, at any rate, a trifle more feminine than his quite normal brother--and hence the differentiation in his pursuits.
We have now, however, to see that among some early peoples the Uranian temperament favored a quite different development; it took on a much more masculine character, and led to the formation of military comradeships of a passionate kind which, instead of discounting, immensely strengthened the warlike ardour of the people concerned, and confirmed their success in campaigns and conquests. The homosexual tendency, in fact, among such peoples, instead of urging towards effeminacy, worked greatly in the opposite direction. It bred ideals of heroism, courage, resource, and endurance among the men, and exalted these virtues into the highest place of public honor. Such was the case among the Dorian Greeks of the 7th century or so, B.C.--of whom I am treating in the present section; and such also seems to have been the case among the Japanese Samurai of the 12th, 13th, and later centuries, A.D., whom I shall deal with presently. In a lesser degree, too, there is evidence of a similar tendency among some other tribes and peoples.
The chief modern accounts of the Dorian Military love are to be found in the History and Antiquities of the Doric Race, by C. O. Müller,[56] and in Professor E. Bethe’s long treatise, Die Dorische Knabenliebe, printed in Frankfurt in 1907.[57] John Addington Symonds also, in his A Problem in Greek Ethics, pp. 23, 24 et seq. of the original edition (1883), gives a sketch of the subject and his views about it.
It seems that the rough and warlike tribes of the Dorians, descending into Greece from Doris and the mountains of the north and west at an early period, probably before 800 B.C., subdued and enslaved the former inhabitants as they came, and largely introduced their own institutions into the countries which they occupied. They spread thus over Sparta and a large part of the Peloponnesus, through the southern archipelago of the Ægean to the coast of Asia Minor, and finally to the island of Crete, in which latter place their customs were preserved for a long period in primitive integrity.
Chief among such customs was this one of military comradeship or paiderastia. The Greek word παιδεραστία (literally “boy-love”) had apparently a wide range of meaning. For a full understanding of it, J. A. Symonds’ Problem in Greek Ethics may with advantage be consulted. The term seems to have applied generally to the love of an elder comrade for a younger; but as far as it referred to or originated from the military relationship it is evident that our word “boy” is hardly appropriate. Clearly the younger had to be of sufficient age or physical stature to bear arms effectively; and his commonly used name παρασταθέυς or παραστατής--the “stand-by” or “stander-by”--is a good indication of his function and utility. He corresponded in fact, in many respects, to, the squire who attended on the mediæval knight; and while such a squire might often be quite youthful, we do not exactly think of him as a “boy.” The difference of age therefore in this military comradeship might be slight or negligible, or in cases it might be considerable.
Again, this kind of love was apparently always conceived of as having an element of physical passion in it--though this element might, of course, be quite slight, or it might be dominant and engrossing. Historically speaking, too, and in different periods and connections, the meaning of the term varied; if it indicated originally the rather heroic devotion of comrades to each other in campaign and warfare, it branched out later into other fields of life, and was adapted to the more spiritual relationship commended by Plato--the philosophia combined with paiderastia of the ideal man--or again to the frankly sensual attachment described in passages of the Greek Anthology. The word consequently has a rather extensive connotation.
In the present paper I incline to use both words, “comrade-love” and “paiderastia,” to denote the Dorian relation, bearing in mind, of course, that a difference of age is generally understood, and using the latter term rather more for the physical and ceremonial side of the attachment, and the former rather more for the emotional and social bond--but without pressing this distinction too closely or persistently. And it might be helpful here to remind the reader, who is troubled as to “where to draw the line” in estimating this kind of love--and in order to help him towards an understanding of the whole subject--that the painful rending-asunder and divorce of the “spiritual” from the “physical,” which so vexes the modern mind, had probably but small place in the minds of many earlier peoples, like the Dorians, whom we are now considering.
I cannot perhaps do better by way of description of this institution than to quote the careful account of it both in Sparta and in Crete given by C. O. Müller in his great work.[58] He says: - “At Sparta the party loving was called εἰσπνήλας and his affection was termed a breathing-in or inspiring (ἐισπνε̃ιν); which expresses the pure and mental connection between the two persons, and corresponds with the name of the other, viz., ἀίτας i.e., listener or hearer. Now it appears to have been the practice for every youth of good character to have his lover; and on the other hand, every well educated man was bound by custom to be the lover of some youth. Instances of this connection are furnished by several of the royal family of Sparta; thus Agesilaus, while he still belonged to the herd (ἀγέλη) of youths, was the hearer (ἀίτας) of Lysander, and himself had in his time also a hearer; his son Archidamus was the lover of the son of Sphodrias, the noble Cleonymus; Cleomenes III. was, when a young man, the hearer of Xenares, and later in life the lover of the brave Panteus. The connection usually originated from the proposal of the lover; yet it was necessary that the listener should regard him with real affection, as a regard to the riches of the proposer was considered very disgraceful; sometimes, however, it happened that the proposal originated from the other party. The connection appears to have been very intimate and faithful; and was recognised by the State. If his relations were absent, the youth might be represented in the public assembly by his lover; in battle, too, they stood near one another, where their fidelity and affection were often shown till death, while at home the youth was constantly under the eyes of his lover, who was to him as it were a model and pattern of life; which explains why, for many faults, particularly for want of ambition, the lover could be punished instead of the listener . . . .”
“This ancient national custom prevailed with still greater force in Crete, which island was hence by many persons considered as the original seat of the connection in question. Here, too, it was disgraceful for a well-educated youth to be without a lover; and hence the party loved was termed κλεινὸς, the praised; the lover being simply called φιλήτωρ.”
Of the institution in Crete--of which the tradition still existed in his time--Strabo, in his Geographica, gives a detailed account.[59] And his account is particularly interesting on account of the similarity of the uses which he describes to the custom of ordinary marriage-by-capture, with which all students of primitive society are familiar. Quoting from Ephorus, who wrote about 340 B.C., Strabo says: - “They have a peculiar custom with respect to their attachments. They do not influence the objects of their love by persuasion, but have recourse to violent abduction. The lover apprises the friends of the youth, three or more days beforehand, of his intention to carry off the object of his affection. It is reckoned a most base act to conceal the youth, or not to permit him to walk about as usual, since it would be an acknowledgment that the youth was unworthy of such lover. But if they are informed that the ravisher is equal or superior in rank or other circumstances to the youth, they pursue and oppose the former slightly, merely in conformity with the custom. They then willingly allow him to carry off the youth. If, however, he is an unworthy person, they take the youth from him. This show of resistance does not end till the youth is received into the Andreium (men’s quarters), to which the ravisher belongs. They do not regard as an object of affection a youth exceedingly handsome, but him who is distinguished for courage and modesty (decorum). The lover makes the youth presents, and takes him away to whatever place he likes. The persons present at the abduction accompany them, and, having passed two months in feasting and the chase (for it is not permitted to detain the youth longer), they return to the city. The youth is dismissed with presents, which consist of a military dress, an ox, and a drinking-cup; the last are prescribed by law; and besides there are many other very costly gifts, so that the friends contribute each their share in order to diminish the expense.
“The youth sacrifices the ox to Jupiter, and entertains at a feast those who came down with him from the mountains. He then declares concerning the intercourse with the lover whether it took place with his consent or not, since the law allows him, if any violence is used in the abduction, to insist upon redress, and sets him free from his engagement to the lover But for the beautiful and high-born not to have lovers is disgraceful, since the neglect would be attributed to a bad disposition.
“The Parastathentes, for this is the name which they give to those youths who have been carried away, enjoy certain honors. At races and at festivals they have the principal places. They are permitted to wear the stole, which distinguishes them from other persons, and which has been presented to them by their lovers; and not only at that time, but in mature age, they appear in distinctive dress, by which each individual is recognised as Kleinos, for this name is given to the object of their attachment, and that of Philetor to the lover. These, then are the usages concerning attachments.”
And C. O. Müller, continuing the passage I cited before, says: - “Institutions so systematic and regular as these did not exist in any Doric State except Crete and Sparta; but the feelings on which they were founded seem to have been common to all the Dorians. The loves of Philolaus, a Corinthian of the family of the Bacchiadæ, and the law-giver of Thebes, and of Diocles, the Olympic conqueror, lasted until death; and even their graves were turned toward each other in token of their affection; and another person of the same name was honored in Megara as a noble instance of self-devotion for the object of his love.”
With regard to the genesis of the institution, J. Addington Symonds, in his Problem in Greek Ethics (original edition, 1883, p. 23), says: - “It has frequently occurred to my mind that the mixed type of παιδεραστία which I have named Greek Love, took its origin in Doris. Homer, who knew nothing about the passion as it afterwards existed, drew a striking picture of masculine affection in Achilles. Friendship occupies the first place in the hero’s heart, while only the second is reserved for sexual emotion. Now Achilles came from Phthia, itself a portion of that mountain region to which Doris belonged. Is it unnatural to conjecture that the Dorians in their migration to Lacedaemon and Crete, the recognised headquarters of the custom, carried a tradition of heroic παιδεραστία along with them? If so, the circumstances of their invasion would have fostered the transformation into a tribal institution. They went forth, a band of warriors and pirates, to cross the sea in boats, and to fight their way along the hills and plains of Southern Greece. The dominions they had conquered with their swords they occupied like soldiers. The camp became their country, and for a long time they literally lived upon the bivouac. . . . Fighting and foraging in company, sharing the same wayside board and heath-strewn bed, rallying to the comrade’s voice in onset, relying on the comrade’s shield when fallen, these men learned the meanings of the words Φιλήτωρ and παραστάτης. To be loved was honorable, for it implied being worthy to be died for. To love was glorious, since it pledged the lover to self-sacrifice in case of need.”
Professor Bethe, in his article on Die Dorische Knabenliebe, to which I have already alluded, says (p. 447): - “Among the Dorians, although the practice was no doubt sensual,[60] paiderastia was not by any means a crime; on the contrary, it was, or could be, or aspired to be, the most complete imaginable union and mutual devotion of two tribesmen, out of which sprung abundant noble impulses towards the perfection of each individual in rivalry with the other, and the most absolute surrender for the sake of the loved one in every danger, and even to death in the very bloom of life. So that the true ideal of military comradeship and high endeavor was realised in these lover-pairs, Who cherished these ideas and sealed them with their blood. And the number of such has certainly been anything but small. Is it not the most wonderful phenomenon in the history of human culture?”
The closeness of the alliance, moreover, is indicated in the foregoing quotation from Strabo, which shows, as we have seen, that certain formalities attending it precisely resembled the primitive rites of ordinary marriage, in the well-known form of “Marriage by capture.” And this fact--as Bethe and others have observed--suggests the great antiquity of the institution and also its wide ramification. Professor Bethe indeed says: - “Consequently the custom must date from a high antiquity, and since certain traces of it in Corinth and Boeotia coincide with the practice in Crete, I think the conclusion is not too rash that not only there but among all the Dorians these same forms once prevailed, and that therefore they date back even to the time before the Dorian immigration, or at any rate before their dispersal.”
The remarks of Strabo above refer especially to Crete, but we have just seen that some indications of a marriage-ceremonial were to be found in Corinth and Boeotia; and it is interesting to note that in Albania--which is the very land from which the Dorians probably came--a marriage-ceremonial still lingers on to-day and is perfectly recognised as customary between a man and a youth who are attached to each other.[61] Anyhow, whether the formalities of marriage were observed or not, the general institution of military comradeship, as we have described it, spread far and wide among the Greek peoples, and immense importance was attached to it. It became a sort of foundational element in their life, a publicly recognised source of political and social activity, an incentive to soldierly valour, and a bulwark of security to the state, an inspiration to art and literature, and a custom consecrated by religion and divine approval. Innumerable stories and legends--whether of “Harmodius and Aristogeiton who slew the despot Hipparchus at Athens; of Diocles and Philoläus, who gave laws to Thebes; of Chariton and Melanippus, who resisted the sway of Phalaris in Sicily; or of Cratinus and Aristodemus, who devoted their lives to propitiate offended deities when a plague had fallen on [paragraph continues]Athens,”[62] testify to the profound interest felt in the subject. And similar stories[63] from Sparta, from Chalkis, from Elis, Eubœa, and other places, show how wide and universal was the impression. As far back as the time of Solon at Athens, the inspiration of paiderastia had taken such hold, and was felt to be so thoroughly honorable, that even he, Athens’ great and wise law-giver, wrote poems in praise of it, and in his laws placed the pursuit of it and of athletics on a par, as worthy of, and to be encouraged in free men, but as forbidden to slaves.[64] Aeschylus and Sophocles did not disdain to make comrade-love the theme of two of their tragedies--the Myrmidones and Niobe respectively--nor is evidence wanting that they personally favored it themselves; and Plato, of course, makes it the corner-stone of much of his philosophy and of more than one of his dialogues. Plato’s Strong and weighty verdict on the value of this bond--a verdict which was apparently a reflection of a good deal of current opinion--is given in the speech of Pausanias in the Symposium, in the form of a rebuke against those peoples who did not honor the love: - “In Ionia and other places, and generally in countries which are subject to the Barbarians, the custom is held to be dishonorable; loves of youths share the evil repute of philosophy and gymnastics, because they are inimical to tyranny; for the interests of rulers require that their subjects should be poor in spirit, and that there should be no strong bond of friendship or society among them,--which Love above all other motives is likely to inspire, as our Athenian tyrants learned by experience.”
Finally, the splendid heroism of the Theban band, composed solely of lovers--which perished to a man at Chaeronaea, B.C. 338, in the last battle of Greek Independence, against the huge army of Philip of Macedon--set a kind of seal to the great tradition of Greek military comradeship, and marked it with an ineffaceable impression of grandeur.
VI. The Dorian Comradeship In Relation To The Status Of Woman
ALTHOUGH, as has been already indicated, there are instances of manly and military institutions of somewhat similar quality among other early peoples, it is doubtful whether in the history of the world there has ever been another case of such complete acceptance of comrade-love as a valued and recognised cult; and certainly this cult has never been associated with such priceless contributions to art, literature and civilisation generally, as in the case of the Greeks. It is consequently all the more strange to find with what neglect the whole subject--both of the love itself and of its relation to political and social life--has been treated in modern times. It is difficult to understand the attitude of mind which--as in some professorial and literary circles--is never tired of pointing out the excellencies of the Greek civilisation, the public spirit and bravery of its peoples, their instinct for beauty, their supremacy (especially at Athens) in literature and art; and yet absolutely ignores a matter which was obviously a foundation element of that civilisation.
The only feasible explanation, to my mind, of this strange phenomenon is that people--taking (it must be said) a very easy-going and superficial view of the whole subject--have assumed that the love-customs and institutions which have been described above were merely adopted as a blind or a cloak for sensuality, and were of no particular importance in themselves. Everyone knows, of course, that homosexual habits of a more or less frivolous and ephemeral kind are to be found fairly widely spread among most peoples; and as it has been generally assumed among Western moralists that nothing good can proceed from the homosexual instinct, it has been possible for a certain class of minds either to pass over the said institutions as being frivolous and unimportant too, or else, if forced to acknowledge their value and importance, to separate this aspect of them entirely from the homosexual aspect, and to say that while the former was glorious the latter was negligible. But as I say, this kind of view is of the most superficial sort. It is impossible, with any seriousness, or deliberate consideration, to maintain on the one hand that the institution of military comradeship among the Dorians--branching out as it did later in the various Greek states into an inspiration of political freedom, or of art, or of philosophy--was frivolous or unimportant; and it is equally impossible on the other hand, to weigh the evidence and not see that a most intimate and, to some degree, physical relation lay at the root of the institution and could not possibly be separated from it--not to see, in fact, that what we call homosexuality was of the essence of the thing. All the historical evidence, and all the literature of this period--whether serious or fanciful, whether in prose or in verse--point to this intimate unity; and what the people themselves, who knew all the circumstances, associated so closely together, it is hard for us to separate and disunite.
We must conclude, then, that the Dorian Greeks and those who were influenced by them regarded a very close and personal love between men as part and parcel of their civic life. Though homosexual, as we should say, in its quality, this love did not interfere with the institution of normal or ordinary marriage, which existing alongside of it had its own sphere of civic value and service--while the comrade-love occupied another sphere, equally necessary.
This being so, it would obviously be as absurd to try to explain away the Greek comradeship, and all the life that flowed from it, by its connection with sensual pleasure of a certain kind, as it would be to explain away the joys and activities of marriage, and the life of the family, by the phenomena of concubinage and hetairism.
There is, however, another explanation which has from time to time been put forward--namely, that the predominance of the Uranian affection in the Greek States was due to the contempt or neglect of women which prevailed there; and this may demand a brief consideration.
Supposing such contempt and neglect to have been proved, the argument even then is not very satisfactory, for it would still remain uncertain which might be the horse and which the cart in the sequence--which the cause and which the effect. But as a matter of fact, to prove anything like general disregard or neglect of women by the Greek peoples would be difficult. Lowes Dickinson, in his Greek View of Life, insists on the prevalent conception among them of the inferiority of the female sex, but he finds himself obliged (p. 164) to qualify this by large exceptions, and he points out (what most authorities agree in) that great fluctuations occurred, and that while in Homer there ruled “a conception of woman and of her relation to man finer and nobler in some respects than that of modern times,” in the 5th and 4th centuries, B.C., a comparatively low estimate had become dominant. Benecke, in his Women in Greek Poetry, (Sonnenschein, 1896,) goes with much care into this subject, and makes some remarks which are very helpful for our purpose. He says (p. 7): - “It is generally agreed that in prehistoric times the position of women among the Greeks was a much higher one than was the case subsequently. There seems every reason to believe that the social conditions of the Lesbians and the Dorians, and the other nations which did not come under the influence of the history-writing Ionians, were but the survivals of what was originally a more or less general state.” This is especially interesting to us because it points to the fact that the institution of military comradeship which came into Greece with the Dorians from prehistoric sources must have been in its inception associated with just such a high standard in the position of women, and not by any means with their neglect or contempt. This association is also very noticeable in Homer. For the main motive of the Iliad is, as Benecke observes, undoubtedly the dramatic and passionate comradeship between Achilles and Patroclus; yet no one could say that Andromache or Penelope or Nausicaa are negligible or servile characters.
There is ample evidence indeed to show that the status of women among the early Dorians was one of freedom and honour--a survival, perhaps, of a matriarchal period. Addington Symonds, in his Key of Blue [65] (p. 64), says: - “This masculine love did not exclude marriage, nor had it the effect of lowering the position of women in society, since it is notorious that in those Dorian States where the love of comrades became an institution, women received more public honour and enjoyed fuller liberty and power over property than elsewhere.” C. O. Müller, in his already quoted book (vol. ii., p. 395), says: - “The Dorians, as well at Sparta as in the South of Italy, were almost the only nation who esteemed the higher attributes of the female mind as capable of cultivation.” In Sparta the women had great sway and influence. The wife was called δέσποινα (mistress) by the husband. As girls they were “trained by physical exercise for the healthy performance of the duties of motherhood; they were taught to run and wrestle naked, like the youths, to dance and sing in public, and to associate freely with men. Marriage was permitted only in the prime of life; and a free intercourse, outside the limits of marriage, between healthy men and women was encouraged and approved by public opinion.”[66]
It may be worth while to quote entire the passage in which Plutarch (Lycurgus, c. 14) describes this state of affairs. He first of all cites Aristotle as saying (Polit, Book ii.) that “in the absence of their husbands, the wives made themselves absolute mistresses at home, and would be treated with as much respect as if they had been so many queens;” and then he goes on to say that Lycurgus “took for that sex all the care that was possible. As an instance of it, he ordered the maidens to exercise themselves with wrestling, running, throwing the bar, and casting the dart, to the end that the fruit they conceived might take deeper root, and grow strong, and spread itself in strong and healthy bodies; and withal that they themselves, by such robust exercises, might be the more able to undergo the pains of child-bearing with ease and safety. And to the end he might take away their overgreat tenderness and that acquired womanishness which vain custom hath added to the natural, he ordered that they should go naked as well as the young men, and dance, too, in that condition at their solemn feasts and sacrifices, singing certain songs, whilst the young men stood in a ring about them, seeing and hearing them. In these songs they now and then gave a satirical glance, to very good purpose, on those who had misbehaved themselves (in the wars), and some times sang enconiums upon such as had done any gallant action; and by these means enflamed the younger sort with an emulation of their glory. Those that were thus praised for their bravery, and in high credit among the virgins, went away hugely satisfied with such commendation; and those who were rallied were as sensibly touched with it as if they had been formally and severely reprimanded; and so much the more because the Kings and the whole Senate, as well as the rest of the rest of the city, went to see and hear all that passed.”[67]
This passage is particularly interesting here for two reasons:--(1) because it shows the respect of the men for the opinion of the women--their praise or their blame; and (2) because of the extraordinarily public and open life of the latter, here represented, and the equality of their physical training with that of the men. With regard to this last, we have in the Epithalamium of Theocritus (Idyll xviii.) a charming picture of a chorus of Spartan maidens singing before the bridal chamber of Helen, and reminding her of how they used to exercise by the banks of the Eurotas:--
“Thrice eighty virgins we pursued the race,
Like men, anointed with the glistering oil.”[68]
No wonder it has been said of the Spartans that they were “the most healthy of the Greeks, and that the most beautiful men as well as women were found amongst them.”[69] Nor can we be surprised to read further in Plutarch the anecdote of Gorgo, wife of King Leonidas, - “who being told, in discourse with some foreign ladies, ‘You women of Lacedaemon are they only of the world who have an empire over the men,’ she briskly reparteed: ‘A good reason, for we are the only women who bring forth Men.’”[70] All this goes to show clearly enough that--however it may have been in other Greek States, or at other times--contempt and neglect of women did not prevail in Sparta in the period which we are considering; and it proves conclusively that the institution of military love among the Dorians did not rest upon inferiority in the character of the women, or on any insufficiency of access to them.[71] The love was an independent and authentic phenomenon, self-produced out of the heart and temperament of the people, and not to be explained away by adventitious and subsidiary circumstances.
And it suggests a further speculation, namely, whether the Uranian temperament in the Dorian men--or such amount of it as existed among them--did not naturally favour rather than discourage this freedom and self-dependence and political activity of the women. In present-day life it pretty clearly is so. It is the Uranian classes of men, or those at least who are touched with the Uranian temperament, who chiefly support the modern woman’s movement. They, among the men, are those who sympathise with the aspirations of women towards liberty. The downright normal man with whom the passion for the other sex is the dominant note of life may love and care for his womenkind; but it is generally with a proprietary sort of love. He does not exactly want to see them independent and self-determining of their fates. It is the man in whom sex-polarity is not too pronounced and dominant who looks for comradeship in woman, and is glad to give her an equal footing with himself in social life. And so also was it, perhaps, among some of these early and prehistoric peoples of whom the Dorian traditions and the Homeric poems give us a glimpse.
Certainly it is curious that the gradual fall of the status of women in Greece from those early days down to the 5th, 4th, and 3rd centuries, B.C., when the position of the wife became that of a domestic drudge, and her ideal was “to stay at home and mind the house” [72]--that this fall was simultaneous with the gradual decline of the honour in which manly love was held, and its gradual deterioration from a great civic institution into a mere personal pastime and indulgence. The growth of civilisation (as has elsewhere been remarked)[73] had from the first the effect of accentuating the sex-passion. The luxurious selfishness of men was stimulated in a way that led to the ultimate enslavement of women; and it is possible that the simultaneous decay of the Uranian love removed the one force which might have acted in the opposite direction-namely, towards heroism, endurance, military and civic efficiency, and a generous sense of comradeship towards the other sex. Curious, I say, that these two changes should have gone on simultaneously, and suggestive of the question whether there may not be a necessary connection between them. Curious, too, to find that in our present-day civilisations where (till quite recently) the position of women had reached its lowest ebb, the Uranian attachment has similarly been disowned and its healing influences utterly ignored.
With regard to the general suggestion just made that in very early times--bordering on the prehistoric and matriarchal--love of a homosexual or Uranian kind had a far wider scope and acknowledged place in social life than in later days, I may, of course, refer to the earlier chapters in this volume--which must anyhow convince us of the immense ramifications and importance of the impulse in primitive societies. And, with regard to the special peoples we are dealing with in this paper, it may be desirable here to point out that this impulse among the early Greek peoples was by no means confined to the men, but was active and salient among the women also. Plutarch, in his Lycurgus (c. 18), speaking of paiderastia among the Spartans, says: - “This sort of love was so much in fashion among them that the most staid and virtuous matrons would own publicly their passion to a modest and beautiful virgin.”[74] The loves of the Lesbian women and of Sappho (B.C. 600) have been celebrated in all literature, and have in modern times been treated with more respect, perhaps, and understanding, than their counterpart among Greek men. Bethe, in his treatise cited above, says, speaking first of the attachment among the Greek men: - “It is clear that the Aeolian warriors in Lesbos about 600, B.C., favored the same in their general admiration for the Spartan ways, although in their poetry this does not show itself very strongly. But the very close alliances of women there--well-known in connection with Sappho--presuppose equally close bonds among the men; just as these latter in Sparta had their counterpart in feminine associations.”[75] And in another passage, rebutting the contention that these homosexual relations sprang from the seclusion of the sexes from each other, he says: - “The attempt breaks down utterly in face of the fact that just in Sparta and Lesbos, where we know most about this boy-love and girl-love, the sexes to the best of our knowledge, mixed with each other more freely than in the other Greek States.”[76]
There appears to have been a curious custom in Sparta, connected with the ordinary marriage by capture, which may be mentioned here as suggesting some wavering, so to speak, at that time, of the line between male and female. “The bridegroom,” says Müller,[77] ”brought the young virgin, having carried her off from the chorus of maidens or elsewhere, to the bride’s maid--who cut short her hair, and left her lying in a man’s dress and shoes, without a light, on a bed of rushes; until the bridegroom returning from the public supper, carried the bride to the nuptial couch, and unloosed her girdle.” Whatever may have been the exact meaning of this custom, it almost suggests that marriage by capture of women was preceded by marriage by capture of youths.
At any rate, it becomes quite clear, I think, from all this that no extraneous explanation--about the relative position of women, or the fortuitous confusion of abstract friendship with mere sensual passion--is needed in order to account for the genesis of boy-love or comrade-love among the Dorians, and the growth of this love into a positive institution. It sprang quite naturally from the temperament of the people--just as any one nowadays may see it springing spontaneously, though obscurely, in all classes of modern society, and as it has sprung also at various times in the past in Persia or Arabia or Japan, or among the other peoples mentioned in the first essay in this volume. In each of these cases it may have had a different complexion and expression according to the genius of the people concerned, in some it may have been established as a civic or a military institution, in others it may have fallen short of this kind of recognition; but in all, I think, we may say it has been a natural and not an artificial racial outgrowth. In no case may it have been a perfectly ideal thing, but almost always it has been a positive, serious and deep-rooted impulse; and the problem before each people has been not to extinguish the impulse, but to turn it into a great, publicly-recognised and honorable force making for the welfare of the community. We have seen in what way the Dorians solved this problem.
VII. Relation To Civic Life And Religion
BUT more has to be said before the full scope and character of the Dorian solution can be recognised. It is quite in keeping with what we know of the hardihood, public spirit, military prowess, and so forth, of the Doric race, to find that in this matter of love between an elder warrior and a younger it was not the epithet καλός which was the coveted one, but ἀγαθός--not to be “beautiful” or “handsome,” but to be “worthy,” “brave,” “efficient.” This last was the decisive thing.[78] The Athenian and other peoples, with greater refinement and artistic sense, might worship beauty and indulge in a kind of luxurious contemplation of it; καλὸς ὁ πᾶις, “fair, fair is the youth,” is their constant refrain in epigram and inscription; but to the Dorian it was valor, efficiency, which drew his admiration. It is like the difference between the Doric architecture and that of the Ionians or Corinthians. There is a certain severity about the first-mentioned--an absolute adaptation to use, and freedom from superfluous ornament. The sense of public life, in fact, and of dedication to the common weal, was so strong among the Dorians--as we see in many other ways--that it deeply coloured their love-relations, and gave the latter a scope and a purpose considerably beyond that of personal gratification. The normal marriage, as we have already seen, was regulated in the interests of the State; and so too, the love between men and youths, instead of sinking as it did among some peoples into a dilettante affair and matter of private indulgence, was lifted into an important institution in the interests of general education and militarism. The love was not by any means--as a score of passages show--a purely ideal or abstract sentiment; but what is interesting to us is the splendour of the result which was evolved out of its comparatively coarse and sensual roots.
“The Dorians,” says Bethe, “regulated the love-relation of the man to the youth in fixed forms, and dealt with it quite openly and with honorable seriousness, as deeming it an important institution under the ægis of the Family, the Public, the State, and Religion. Everywhere among them--in Sparta, Crete, Thebes, or wherever anything more than the mere fact has come down to us--we clearly discover that paiderastia was among the ruling class the foundation of all training towards ἀρετή (courage, virtue), in other words, towards manly efficiency such as shows itself principally in war, and the cultivation and preservation of the same. For to a point beyond this somewhat narrow and mediæval conception of virtue, the Dorian States never attained, and could not well attain, as long as their outlook on life remained. The highest ethic and wisdom that Theognis had to offer, he was fain to put into words of counsel to a beloved youth who should be the inheritor of his ἀρετή.”
“In Sparta,” he continues, “the lovers were so far responsible for their loved ones that for any dishonorable conduct of the latter they--not the latter--were punished. And it was the lover, as well as the youth’s relatives, who represented the beloved in all affairs in the Agora--to which indeed the latter was not admitted till his 30th year. So that in fact the Erastes is put legally on an equal footing with the father and elder brothers of the Eromenos--indeed, even above them, since he bears a responsibility for him which the latter’s family does not undertake.” Speaking further of the custom of placing lover-pairs together in the battle-ranks, Professor Bethe says that the reason for this is obvious: - “Any conduct that was not in accordance with the chivalric sense of honour was barred on the one hand by the anxiety of the man to be a model to his beloved of true ἀρετή, and no less by the latter’s consciousness of his duty to show himself worthy of his lover.” And then he quotes the well-known words of Phædrus in Plato’s Banquet: - “I say, then, that if a man who loves should be discovered doing anything dishonourable or through fear suffering the same without resistance, he would not be so shamed or pained before his own father or companions, or any one else, as before his beloved youth. And we see the same with regard to the youth, that he throws disgrace especially on his lovers when he is discovered in any dishonour.”
J. Addington Symonds has a very interesting essay,[79] in which he compares the love-ideal of mediæval and feudal Europe with that of ancient Greece. Both loves became recognised and accepted institutions, and both had the same social purpose, namely the formation of the perfect knight-the embodiment of honour and bravery. But in the first case it was the devotion to one fair lady-and through her to all the suffering and oppressed women-kind; and in the second case it was devotion to some youth, and through him to the whole commonwealth--which led to this result. In both cases the love was apart from and outside of ordinary matrimony. The mediæval knight might be duly married, but what inspired his romance and heroism was worship of some lady--who was probably the wife of another; and the Dorian knight no doubt had a wife and children at home, but the love which spurred him to his deeds of bravery was for the younger comrade who stood beside him in the ranks. The direct incitements were, in both cases, the same. “Just as in the 12th and 13th centuries,” says Bethe, “the lady sends her warrior suitor from one love-ordeal to another, so does Konon tell of a Cretan youth (Leucocomas, he calls him) who tests his lover (Promachos) with great and dangerous encounters. Such stories are not by any means later growths; they were the commonly accepted view of the matter in the 5th century, B.C., certainly in the 6th. For the contemporaries of Aeschylus and Pindar were hardly able to think of warrior-pairs like Achilles and Patroclus, Theseus and Peirithous, Herakles and Ioläus, otherwise than as pairs of lovers.”
Thus it was largely for the purpose of spreading a high standard of public honour, bravery, and efficiency, that military comradeship was encouraged among the Dorians. It worked powerfully among the boys and youths, who aspired to become men, and especially to be loved by some heroic warrior;[80] and it had a deep influence on the men, who (referring again to the extract from Strabo) would be well received by the boy’s relations if of good name and fame, but rejected if “unworthy.” Remembering that the Dorian polity was an aristocracy, in which families of good name and tradition had a great sway, we see how it was that to become the παραστάτης or squire of a well-known warrior, was to become at once κλεινος or distinguished, to wear a distinctive dress, and to pass into a good social position; while on the other hand, for a man to have his advances towards a youth refused by the relations was to suffer the deepest of insults.
We have thus seen that the education of the youths, the honour and fair name of the men, efficiency in battle, and the safety of the State were all involved in the Dorian Custom of military comradeship. It is needless, therefore, to remark that religion was also involved; for in the old pagan world every great social custom was identified with or sanctioned by religion.
With regard to this point the remarkable investigations of Hiller von Gaertringen, a few years ago in the island of Thera, in the Ægean Sea, yield important evidence. As we have already said, the Dorians on their immigration settled not only in various parts of Greece, but in the islands of the Ægean and in Crete. One of these islands was Thera (or Santorin), and it became an important centre--a holy place and resort of the Dorian tribes, with temples and dancing and running grounds.[81] At some early period it had been occupied by the Phoenicians; but Strabo calls it “a colony of the Lacedæmonians, and the mother-city of the Cyrenians;” and there seems little doubt that it was colonised from Sparta, and that afterwards it sent out a colony to Cyrene in Africa. As this latter event took place about 630 B.C., it seems probable that the former was not later than 700 B.C. Here, then, on one hill on this island are the remains of temples and holy places--sacred to Apollo (Karneios and Delphinios), to Zeus, Athena, Artemis, and others; and close at hand an old circular structure and a natural cavern, “both of which were later united by the Gymnasium-building, and were clearly at that early period dedicated to the Dorian athletic exercises and dances of youths.”[82] Less than a stone’s throw from these, on the side of the sacred mountain itself, are (as Hiller found and copied) a quantity of very archaic inscriptions, at least as old as the 7th century, B.C., deeply chiselled in the rock (as it were for all time) in letters four to six inches long, and celebrating the names and the betrothals of comrades.[83] We are accustomed, in the modern world, to see love-inscriptions on trees and even rocks, of feminine names; but here we have the names of youths and men. Let us give Hiller’s own words:[84] - “At first we find the simple names, like Aglon, Maisiadas, Kikinnios, Arasimandros, Biaios, Euryteles, Tharres, and many another. But soon we find the same with additions: ‘Moniadas is the first’--’Ainesis was brought up by the Graces’--’So and so is good, so and so is good (ἀγαθός).’”
Leaving Hiller for a moment, it is interesting to see here, what we noticed before, the admiration of this people for “goodness,” valour, efficiency, rather than for beauty. The epithet καλός in this collection hardly appears more than once, but the epithet ἀγαθός over and over again, sometimes alone, as Laqudidas agathos or Telekrates agathos, sometimes in praise of their dancing, as Βαρβαξ ορκhειται τε αγαθος, or Ευμηλος αριστος ορκhεστας.
Continuing, then, Hiller says: - “But presently the inscriptions speak more plainly. We find not only praise of the best dancer, but also direct evidence of the love of youth in quite sensual form--over which later ages sought to draw a veil. For evidence of this, I refer to the classic examples, I.G. xii., 3, 536-540. They prove to us the rude habits of the Dorian settlers, and they show also their total absence of prudery, and an entirely different sentiment on these subjects from what afterwards prevailed.”
Among the examples referred to are for instance 536, saying that Pheidippidas was united to Timagoras, or 537 (also quoted by Bethe), saying: “Here in these sacred precincts, with invocation of the Delphinian, Krimon was united to the son of Bathycles.”[85] In the latter, the solemn appeal to the Delphinian Apollo (ναι τον Δελπhινιον) assures us of the religious character of the betrothal; and others of the inscriptions contain similar dedications. Hiller himself says: - “Of the various lovers one invokes Apollo,[86] another Delphinios--that is Apollo again--as witness that he has fulfilled his proper duty.”
Ordinary marriage between man and woman has, of course, in all ages and among most peoples, been made a religious institution, and has been ceremonially sealed in the presence of the deity and with the invocation of his name--as in our Christian churches; but it is strange to find here a similar ritual between men. Yet, as a matter of fact, even to-day, in Albania, and under the protection of the Greek Church, something of the kind--as already mentioned--continues. Hahn, in his Albanesische Studien, says that the Dorian customs of comradeship still flourish in Albania “just as described by the ancients,” and are closely entwined with the whole life of the people. (The elder lover instructs and, when necessary, reproves the younger, follows him jealously about, fights duels on his behalf, protects him, makes him presents of various kinds, and so forth.) And he describes, in some detail, the church ceremonial attending the brotherhood-union of two men. And Dr. p. Naecke, reporting[87] information received from Albania, says: - “The Skipetars (North Albanians) entertain for handsome youths a quite enthusiastic love. Their passion and jealousy is so strong that even to-day sometimes a case of suicide on that account will occur. . . . Further, it is quite true that the brotherhood-unions when taking place are blessed by the priests--the two partners sharing the Eucharist immediately after. With the Turks the ceremony is different. My landlord (a Christian) in Ochrida sealed blood-brotherhood with an Albanian Moslem (Gega). The two made incision in each other’s fingers, and sucked drops of each other’s blood. Henceforth one must stand by the other in life and death; and for the Christian landlord that is a valuable guarantee.”
The latter part of this passage is interesting as showing how in Albania, though the blood-brotherhoods may be sanctified by some kind of religious ceremonial, they still in some cases overpass the ordinary religious barriers--as between Christian and Turk. And Hahn, again, in his book, says that religious differences do not form a bar. The Turk loves the Christian, and the Christian the Turk, and many a Christian has gone over to Islam because his beloved had promised, on this condition, to be subject to him.
Here then, it would seem, at Thera there was a celebrated holy place and rendezvous of the Doric race,[88] and hither, at festival periods, crowds would come;--comrade-pairs would ratify their alliances in the temple-precincts, and lovers would inscribe the names of their beloved on the rocks.
If this was the case at Thera, would there not be other places, we may ask, where similar ceremonies took place? And Professor Bethe, with great plausibility, suggests that there were. “I do not doubt,” he says,[89] ”that starting from the above solid evidence we can also interpret that custom of the Thebans which lingered still in Aristotle’s time, and attracted his attention. ‘On the grave of the hero Ioläus,’ he wrote, ‘lovers and their beloved youths still pledge their troth with one another;’[90] and Plutarch adds: ‘because Ioläus was the favorite of Heracles, and for that reason took part in his battles as his squire.’ In Thebes no doubt at that time folk would be satisfied with a festal symbolical ceremony, corresponding to betrothal before divine witnesses. But originally in Thebes, even as in Thera, the act must have been carried out right on the holy place in the presence of the heroic prototype and patron of comrade-love. To understand the meaning of the name, The Sacred Band, from the sacredness of these comrade-alliances is now easy.” Further he suggests that the competition which yearly took place among the youths at the tomb of the great hero and lover, Diocles, in Megara--and which is known to us through Theocritus (Idyll xii.)--had a similar origin; and represented the survival of actual betrothals which once were celebrated there, as at a holy place.
There is certainly something very grand about this whole conception and manifestation of the Uranian love among the Dorians. The wonderful stories--treasured in the hearts of the Greek peoples for centuries--of heroic bravery and mutual devotion inspired by it; the high seriousness with which it was cultivated both as a political safeguard and as a means of the education of youth, the religious sanction and dedication to the gods, and withal the absolute recognition of its human and passional origin, cannot fail to make us feel that here was a great people with a unique message for the world. Certainly we shall never in modern times understand this love until we realise this quality of it and its immense capabilities.
The modern peoples, it must be said, seem to have a strangely low estimate of love in general. Even the quite normal love between man and wife--though recognised as the foundation of the family, and contributing somewhat to the education of children--does not often figure as an inspiration to political life or to public service; and certainly, in the public mind, has no great association with religion. Indeed the physical circumstances of marriage are generally looked upon as repugnant to religion, and the sexual relation between man and woman as in itself unclean, and by no means to be thought of in connection with a church or other consecrated place or the divinity that may dwell there. Yet we know that this low estimate has not by any means been universal. It seems to mark a certain period, and to characterise certain races in the evolution of humanity. The Jewish peoples--perhaps by way of protest and reaction against the excesses of the surrounding Syrian tribes--insisted on a complete divorce between sex and religion; and that alienation of the two has lasted on down the Christian centuries. But in much of the old pagan world it was just the contrary. Sexual rituals were an intimate part of religion; and the wonder and glory of sex were a recognised manifestation of divinity. In India, even to-day, I believe, ordinary marriages are sometimes consummated within the temple-precincts; women who wish for children pay their respects in a very practical way to the lingams or phallic emblems in the sacred cloisters, just as they did in earlier times to the priests themselves, representing the gods; and the devadasis, or girls who dance before the divinities, are still treated with honour and a certain reverence, though their sexual functions in connection with the temple services, dating from thousands of years back (but now largely discontinued), are well-known. In the temples of Syria, and in other cases--some of which have just been touched upon in the first paper in this volume--a similar rapprochement between sex and religion existed.
In all these cases it has been the usual criticism of the votaries of Christianity to say that this connection or rapprochement only proves how unworthy and debased and merely sensual the religions of the old world were. But does this conclusion follow? Doubtless in cases these worships were unworthy and debased. But would not the argument be equally valid if it were said that our conclusion that religion was soiled by its contact with sex only proves how unclean our conception of sex is? In the Upanishads of India--a series of writings, which perhaps show the high-watermark of the religious sense in any age of the world--the perfectly naive, direct and open way in which the physical facts of human love are brought into direct touch with the supreme inspiration of the religious consciousness affords to us a profound lesson, which we should do well to bear in mind. In the Brihadáranyaka Upanishad--one of the finest of the Upanishads--there is a passage in which instruction is given to the man who desires a noble son as to the prayers which he shall offer to the gods on the occasion of congress with his wife. In simple and serene language it directs him how - “when he has placed his virile member in the body of his wife, and joined his mouth to her mouth,” he should pray to the various forms of deity who preside over the operations of nature: to Vishnu to prepare the womb of the future mother, to Prajapati to watch over the influx of the semen, and to the other gods to nourish the fœtus, etc.[91] How far all this seems from the modern mind, how alien, how profane!
Yet the gross details of physical union were obviously not unclean to the writers of this and similar passages in the Upanishads. There is indeed, for instance, not a little reason for thinking that many of the early peoples regarded the semen as the vehicle and special condensation of the soul.[92] The soul was transferred to the woman, perhaps for re-embodiment in the child, perhaps for union with and reinforcement of her soul.
And it must be confessed that in view of all the conclusions of modern thought and science, such a theory, if not by any means to be considered valid or even adequate, does at any rate appear a natural and not impossible one. To such people, then, the so-called physical union was in very truth and reality a sacred affair taking place in the presence of the gods, and vouched for by the amazing inspiration and revelation of the passion of love itself.
And leaving aside this special theory with regard to the semen; we to-day can see that in the more subtle and refined intimacies of lovers in caresses and embraces, and in the silent influences of mere presence and nearness, there do pass over from one to the other elements of character, shades of feeling and disposition, and something indeed of the nature of the soul. That well-known and fine epigram of Plato conveys this very idea:--
“Thee as I kist, behold I on my lips my own soul was trembling;
For, bold one, she had come, meaning to find her way through.”
And yet, strangely enough, while this is recognised, there is little sense in modern times of the sacredness of love, even in its most gracious forms, nor any inclination to connect it with religion. The marvellous and mysterious process by which the soul, the very inner being, of one person passes over and transfuses that of another, seems to be passed by or treated as something unworthy. How vulgar--if one may use the word--is our current conception of these subjects!
However, with the modern world--except for the purpose of illustrating certain points--we are not here concerned. The point which I wish especially to illuminate is that love in its more serious aspects was recognised in the old world as having influences on character so deep and solemn that they brought it into close touch with religion. We have seen in the Dorian institution that the love between a man and a youth was largely encouraged on this very ground--of the communication of character, virtue, ἀρετή. For a valiant warrior not to have a youth attached to him as squire or favorite was disgraceful, or even punishable, because so the contagion and inheritance of his valour would be lost.[93] We have seen above, in the account of Ephorus in Strabo, that the relatives would enquire most closely about the honour and bravery of such a lover before surrendering their boy to him. On the other hand, Plutarch, in his Lycurgus (c. 18), says: - “It is a thing remarkable that their lovers had a share in the young lad’s honour or disgrace: and there goes a story that one of them was fined by the magistrates, because the lad whom he loved cried out effeminately as he was fighting. . . . And though several men’s fancies met in one person, yet did not this cause any strangeness or jealousy among them, but was rather the beginning of a very intimate friendship, whilst they all jointly conspired to render the belov’d boy the most accomplished in the world.”
Such a contagion and identification of the sense of honour between two persons could obviously only come about through a deep and heroic love between them; and when such love ramified widely, as indicated in the last quotation, from one to another through the land, and when the standard of honour concerned was the welfare of the country--then clearly the “soul” transmitted by means of the love-relation was not merely the soul of any one individual concerned, but was the Soul of the People--that is, in other words, the inspiration of their religion.
How far the primitive Dorians, beneath their strange customs and quasi-religious rites, may have had an inkling of this truth, it might be difficult to say. Probably no very reasoned perception of it, but rather a kind of sub-conscious intuition. Anyhow, the love-customs of a people whose career was so splendid, and who exercised such a profound influence upon the other Greek peoples, and so on the rest of the world, cannot but be deeply interesting to us moderns--despite such elements of crudeness and barbarism as are certainly to be found among them.
VIII. The Samurai Of Japan: And Their Ideal
THE Samurai of Japan afford another instance of the part played by the Uranian love in a nation’s life, and of its importance; and what we know of their institutions resembles in many respects those of the Dorian Greeks which we have just described. This Order of Knighthood, as it may be called, was the ruling element of Japanese life during six or seven centuries, from 1200 A.D. onwards; and it was only in 1870 or so, with the introduction of the new Constitution, that it was dissolved--though its code of personal honour and of social service, under the name Bushido, still has a large, almost a national, following.
Of late years much has been written about the Samurai; and their high tradition of chivalry, their spartan simplicity of life, their bravery, their loyalty, and dedication to the service of their country and its Mikado, are matters of common knowledge.
Lafcadio Hearn, in his Japan: an Interpretation (p. 264, et seq.), tells us that, in the period we are speaking of, Japan, emerging from an earlier and looser tribal state, “was still but a great aggregate of clans and sub-clans kept together by military coercion. At the head of this vast aggregate was the Heavenly Sovereign, the Living God of the race--Priest-Emperor and Pontiff Supreme--representing the oldest dynasty in the world. Next to him stood the Kugé, or ancient nobility, descendants of emperors and of gods. . . Next to the Kugé ranked the Buké, or military class. But the difference in most cases between the lords and the warriors of the Buké was a difference of rank based upon income and title: all alike were Samurai.” He further explains that - “In early times the head of the military class was appointed by the Emperor, only as a temporary Commander-in-chief; afterwards these commanders-in-chief, by usurpation of power, made their office hereditary, and became veritable Imperatores in the Roman sense. Their title of Shogun is well-known to Western readers. The Shogun ruled over between two and three hundred lords (Daimyo: plural) of provinces or districts, whose powers and privileges varied according to income and grade. . . . Before that time each lord exercised supreme rule over his own domain; and it is not surprising that the Jesuit missionaries, as well as the early Dutch and English traders, should have called the Daimyo ‘Kings.’ . . The great Daimyo had their greater and lesser vassals; and each of these again had his force of trained Samurai or fighting gentry.” There was also a particular class of soldier-farmers called Goshi--something like our yeomen.
Thus with the various grades and ranks of Samurai their total number was about two millions, and they were exempted from taxation and privileged each to wear two swords. “Such in brief outline was the general ordination of those noble and military classes by whom the nation was ruled with great severity. The bulk of the common people were divided into three classes: farmers, artisans, and merchants.”
In the book, Bushido, the Soul of Japan,[94] by Inazo Nitobe, which during the last ten years has had a large circulation, an interesting account is given of the moral and social ideal of these Samurai. The author explains that Bu-shi or Bu-ké means Fighting Knight; and so Bushido means literally Military-Knight ways--the ways that fighting nobles should observe in their daily life as well as in their vocation; in a word, the “Precepts of Knighthood,” the noblesse oblige of the warrior class. . . . . “Bushido, then,” he continues, “is the code of moral principles which the knights were required or instructed to observe. It is not a written code; at best, it consists of a few maxims handed down from mouth to mouth, or coming from the pen of some well-known warrior or savant. . . . It was founded not on the creation of one brain, however able, or on the life of a single personage, however renowned. It was an organic growth of decades and centuries of military career. . . . As in England the political institutions of feudalism may be said to date from the Norman Conquest, so we may say that in Japan its rise was simultaneous with the ascendancy of Yoritomo, late in the 12th century. As, however, in England we find the social elements of feudalism far back in the period previous to William the Conqueror, so, too, the germs of feudalism in Japan had been long existent before the period I have mentioned. . . . Coming to possess great honour and great privileges, and correspondingly great responsibilities, they, the Fighting Knights, soon felt the need of a common standard of behaviour, especially as they were always on a belligerent footing and belonged to different clans.”
Mr. Inazo Nitobe then goes on to report, in some detail, this common standard of conduct which inspired the Samurai; and it need hardly be said that he describes it as of fine and heroic quality. Rectitude, justice, courage, endurance, and absolute readiness to die for duty--these were virtues inculcated from childhood onwards with a kind of Spartan insistence. “To rush into the thick of battle and be slain in it, is easy enough, and a common churl is equal to that task; but to live when it is right to live, and to die only when it is right to die--that is true courage. What Samurai youth has not heard of ‘Great Valor’ and of the ‘Valor of a Villein!’”
Simplicity of life again, and contempt of money; the high sense of honour which prompted “Happy Dispatch,” or Harakiri, rather than suffer the least disgrace; these were all characteristics which relate them to the early Spartans. For the Samurai commerce and the vulgar seeking of gain was forbidden. Only in the form of farming was anything of the kind allowed. Yet with all this sternness of life the finer arts were not neglected. As the older people, the Dorians, had their music and dancing and poetry, and their contests of wit, which were specially encouraged among the young folk, so it was with the Samurai. “In the principality of Satsuma, noted for its martial spirit and education, the custom prevailed for young men to practise music; not the blast of trumpets, or the beat of drums, but sad and tender melodies on the biwa, soothing our fiery spirits and drawing our thoughts away from scent of blood and scenes of carnage. Polybius tells us of the Constitution of Arcadia, which required all youths under thirty to practise music, in order that this gentle art might alleviate the rigors of the inclement region. It is to its influence that he attributes the absence of cruelty in that part of the Arcadian mountains.”[95]
In this connection it may be mentioned that Mr. Lowes Dickinson, in a letter from Japan (Manchester Guardian, 12th Sept., 1913), insists upon the remarkable combination of the masculine and the feminine in the Japanese character--of the sensitiveness to beauty with heroic endurance and courage. He says: - “Northerners, and Anglo-Saxons in particular, have always at the back of their minds a notion that there is something effeminate about the sense for beauty . . . but history gives the lie to this complacent theory. No nations were ever more virile than the Greeks or Italians: they have left a mark on the world which will endure when Anglo-Saxon civilisation is forgotten. And none have been, or are, more virile than the Japanese. That they have also the delicacy of women does not alter the fact.”
The author of Bushido also points out that among the Japanese Fighting Knights the study of letters and poetry was common. “Everybody of any education was either a poet or a poetaster. Not infrequently a marching soldier might be seen to halt, take his writing utensils from his belt, and compose an ode--and such papers were found afterwards in the helmets or the breastplates when these were removed from their lifeless wearers.”
How all these details--and among them the inculcation of good manners, and of mercy to the weak or distressed, must not be forgotten--remind us of our own period of chivalry in the West! Truly Mr. Inazo Nitobe has given us an interesting picture; and if, as one seems to find, the picture is all lights and no shadows, doubtless this is because he is painting the ideal of the case rather than the actuality. For the latter, or for phases of the latter, Mitford’s Tales of Old Japan should, of course, be consulted. What the author of Bushido impresses on us with great force is that this ideal became the root of Japanese life. As the figure of the gentle-man, the perfect knight sans peur et sans reproche emerged from our Feudal era, so the ideal of Bushido emerged from the feudal era of Japan. “What Japan was she owed to the Samurai; they were not only the flower of the nation, but the root as well . . . the innumerable avenues of popular amusement and instruction-- the theatres, the story-tellers’ booths, the preachers’ dais, the musical recitations, the novels--have taken for their chief theme the stories of the Samurai. The peasants round the open fire in their huts never tire of repeating the achievements of Yoshitsune[96] and his faithful retainer Benkei, or of the two brave Soga brothers; the dusky urchins listen with gaping mouths until the last stick burns out and the fire dies in its embers, still leaving their hearts aglow with the tale that is told. . . Samurai grew to be the beau-idéal of the whole race. ‘As among flowers the cherry is queen, so among men the Samurai is lord.’ Debarred from commercial pursuits the military class itself did not aid commerce; but there was no channel of human activity, no avenue of thought, which did not receive in some measure an impetus from Bushido. Intellectual and moral Japan was directly or indirectly the work of knighthood.”[97]
There is only one fault to be found with this charmingly written book of Inazo Nitobe’s--but it is a serious one. He tells us that Bushido was the root of Japanese social life, but he does not tell us what was the root of Bushido. The Samurai ideal is a noble one, but, in his account of it, it is something up in the air--it does not touch the ground anywhere. In no passage does he tell us from what great human emotion it sprang, or what it was that through all those centuries held the elements of Bushido together. He indicates (see pp. 7 and 123) that its source was not in religion, for though Shintoism played a large part in Bushido, Mr. Nitobe regards religion as only one of its elements; and so we are left in doubt as to where the ideal really rooted.
And yet there ought not to be any doubt. We have seen in the Dorian Chivalry that whatever elements of religion, of morality, of patriotism there were about it, they were brought to a focus by the personal relation--in that case the love of a man for the youth that fought at his side; or rather their mutual love for each other. It was love that gave life and actuality to the ideal--for the youth to see the glory of Knighthood in the man, for the man to train the youth into an embodiment of his vision. And in the Chivalry of Mediaeval Europe it was much the same: only there the love was that of a Knight for his Lady--or their mutual love of each other; the lady to hold out an image and a symbol of perfection, and the knight to make himself worthy at every point of the light in his lady’s eyes--for her sake to care more for his honour than his life. Probably wherever there has been a great and inspiring ideal of this kind actually moving among a people, there has lain at or very near the root of it that wonderful thing, human love; so individual, so human, and yet so close and vital to the very soul of the race.
Certainly it was so among the Samurai of Japan. The love and devotion of the retainer towards his lord runs like a golden thread through the history of that land; and how intensely personal that devotion might be is illustrated by scores of stories, like the story of the Forty-seven Ronins, or that above mentioned of Yoshitsune and Benkei. But beyond that, and perhaps even deeper and more personal, runs the love between comrades of the same grade, generally but not necessarily an elder and a younger. And here certainly is a point of close resemblance between the chivalry of the Samurai and the chivalry of the Dorians. It was not so much the fair lady of his dreams, or even the wife and family at home, that formed the rallying point of the Samurai’s heroism and loyalty, but the younger comrade whom he loved and who was his companion-at-arms. In Mitford’s Tales of Old Japan this motive shows but slightly. But in the case of that book--excellent as it is in its way--it is easy to see from the mode of its production, the tales being selected for British consumption and more or less re-cast, of course, in the telling, that the theme which interests us here is comparatively neglected. One must go to the Japanese authors and storytellers themselves--as I shall do presently--to show the matter in its true light.
Mr. Suyewo-Iwaya, of Tokio, in an article on Comrade-Love in Japan, says [98]: - “From 1200 A.D. onwards the Samurai became prominent in Japan. To them it seemed more manly and heroic that men should love men and consort with them, than to give themselves over to women. For several centuries this view had sway far and wide. Almost every knight sought out a youth who should be worthy of him, and consolidated with such youth a close blood-brotherhood. It often happened that on account of the beloved one the knight would become involved in an affair of jealousy or a duel. If one reads Nanshok-Okagami (a series of tales on this subject by Saikak, a celebrated novelist of the 17th century) one will find plenty of stories of this sort. Thus the relation remained at first only between knights and knightlings (so they called the favorites), but afterwards it became more general.” Further, the same author says: - “It is also remarkable that this kind of love is not known to the same degree in all the provinces of Japan. It seems that it has spread more widely in the Southern part than in the Northern provinces. There are regions where the general public knows nothing of it. On the other hand, in Kyushu, and especially in Satsuma, it is from of old very wide spread. That arises possibly from the fact that people there in Satsuma prize courage and manliness so very highly, while in other provinces where comrade-love is little or not at all known, women command much more attention and love. For one hears it said by well-informed folk that the population in those provinces where the love of youths prevail is more manly and robust, while in regions which are void of it the people are softer, more lax, and often more dissolute.” Satsuma is celebrated, of course, even down to to-day for the great athletes and warriors it produces and has produced; and it has been pointed out what a remarkable list may be made of well-known heroes of the Russo-Japanese war coming from this general region--among them for instance, Field-Marshals Saigo, Kawamura, and Oyama, and Admirals Togo and Yamamoto. Mr. Suweyo Iwaya says (Ibid., pp. 467, 468) that the knightlings (corresponding to the Dorian eromenoi) were called Kosho, and Dr. Karsch-Haack,[99] drawing his information partly from Iwaya and partly from other sources, says that “the Samurai, including the military and nobility, in the feudal period from the 12th century onwards, were reckoned the first and most honorable class in Japan, and the custom rooted itself among them more and more, especially among the Daimyo chiefs, of having attached to them, besides their wives, fine young men or youths--their Kosho. And this passionate love-relation of a knight to the youth whom he had sought and won--a relation which now and again under special circumstances would end in the simultaneous death of both partners--found its Japanese Homer in the unknown poet-author of the romance Shidzu-no Odamaki.”
A Japanese friend of mine assures me that of all the historical characters of the “Age of Wars” (400 years ago) Nobunaga Oda, a great overlord and warrior-chief, was one of the most famous. He is said to have had many Kosho; but of them all Rammaru Mori was the most intelligent and beautiful, and his special favourite. Tradition affirms that the love-relation between Nobunaga and Rammaru was most intimate. When Nobunaga’s vassals revolted against him, Rammaru fought very bravely for his lord, and seriously damaged the enemy; but in a surprise attack Nobunaga’s party was defeated, and he and Rammaru perished fighting side by side.
Dr. Karsch-Haack goes on to say that the region of Satsuma has been from of old, and is yet to-day the centre of this comrade-love; and as an explanation of this fact he mentions the opinion just quoted, which prevails there, concerning the greater tendency of the affection to produce manliness and efficiency in the population; but he says that “beyond this there used to be in Satsuma under the old feudal regime-and until it was abolished in 1868--a law which considerably limited normal intercourse between man and woman, imposing the death penalty on any young man under thirty who had dealings of sexual nature with a woman.[100] This law arose out of the circumstance that the population of Satsuma was of a very warlike breed, and as generally ten to twenty thousand men would be absent from home on military campaigns, they would naturally be in continual anxiety about the fidelity of their wives, left exposed to the importunities of the younger generation, unless the latter were kept in check by severest penalties.”
We have already mentioned the romance Shidzu-no Odamaki, and as an illustration of Samurai comradeship a brief digest of it may be given (from the same author). The scene is laid towards the end of the 16th century, and describes the devotion existing between the young man Yoshida Daizo, of the Daimyo’s Court, and the youth Hirata Sangoro, son of the chief attendant of the court. Yoshida’s love for Hirata begins with his rescue of the latter from the hands of two scoundrels, and on the outbreak of Japan’s second war with Korea (1597), Yoshida takes Hirata as his companion-at-arms with him. Their ages are now twenty-five and fifteen respectively. Yoshida falls in battle, and when Hirata learns of this, he throws himself on the enemy and dies a hero’s death. The story ends with the remark: “Hirata’s death was the simple result of his heartfelt devotion to Yoshida, and his self-forgetting friendship compelled him to this tragic end. But such blossoms of knightly courage in the feudal times are familiar to all, and we know how much this sort of love-intimacy was prized, and what tears this manner of dying elicited.”
Of the same period apparently is the romance Mokukudzu-Monogatari. A young Samurai, Unemé, of eighteen years of age, and in the service or retinue of the lord Funakawa, falls desperately in love with Ukyo, a youth of sixteen, also a Samurai, and in the retinue of another lord, Sakuragawa. Ukyo is wonderfully beautiful, well-formed, and well-mannered, but Unemé finds no opportunity to approach him or to confess his passion. A chance meeting only makes matters worse. “Tortured by unsatisfied longing he falls into a sheer love-sickness. To impart his secret to anyone he does not dare. Even his doctor fails to fathom the cause of his suffering. But when one day the patient receives a visit from some acquaintances, who by chance bring Ukyo with them, he at once is himself again, and his face fairly shines with joy. Though his beloved does not understand, Unemé directs towards him all the fulness of his heart. Only one of his friends, the Shiga Samonosuke, notices the change which Ukyo’s presence brings, and he guesses the secret. Unemé, at first, when Samonosuke challenges him, denies the truth out of shame. But presently Samonosuke finds verses in which Unemé has given expression to his agony of love for Ukyo; and this discovery brings about an open conversation. Unemé confesses to Samonosuke his love, and at the same time his dread of exposure and punishment, and his fear that under this unhappy dispensation he will die. Samonosuke tries to soothe these anxieties, and offers himself as mediator between lover and beloved. And so it comes about that Ukyo receives a letter from Unemé with a love-poem therein. In his answer Ukyo expresses his hope of seeing Unemé again right soon in full health and activity; and Ukyo’s friendliness works like a charm on Unemé, who at once feels that he has recovered. In their respective occupations opportunities of meeting do not so often present themselves to the youthful pair. Only at a festival, on the occasion of a visit of the Shogun, do they come to definite speech and mutual understanding. The youths swear to each other--whatever else may happen--to hold together in life and in death.
“And from thenceforward they are one heart and one soul. Till evil fate in the shape of Hosono Chuzen, a contemporary and old comrade of Unemé, steps between. This fellow, a young man of bad and insolent nature and of repellent aspect, had already for some time been scheming for the possession of Ukyo, but the latter had taken no notice of him. Now, however, he thinks the time has come for him to represent his desire through the mediation and introduction of a third person, but is curtly and indignantly repulsed by Ukyo. Hosono, out of revenge, determines on Ukyo’s death. When Ukyo hears a report of this, he decides at first to turn to Unemé for help, but rejecting this plan as too womanish, resolves to forestall his mortal enemy, and does so by stabbing him to death. Ukyo’s superior officer hears of the murder, and brings him to justice; but when Ukyo makes known the circumstances which led to his deed, he is only punished by a lenient confinement. Hosono’s father, however, with the help of the Shujin Nato, in whose service he is, brings a charge before Sakuragawa against the murderer of his son; and Sakuragawa is obliged to repeal the former sentence, and condemn the guilty man to harakiri.
“Unemé, meanwhile, knowing nothing of all this, is on a visit to his mother in Kanagawa. Being informed by a letter from Samonosuke of what has happened, he takes most affectionate leave of his mother, and forever, in order to return with all speed to Yedo. On his earliest arrival he repairs immediately to the Keiyo-ji Temple, the place where such executions were always accomplished, and on that very spot comes upon Ukyo in the midst of the tragic preparations for his own suicide. He throws himself on the ground beside Ukyo; and the friends once again exchange a few words of tenderest import, embrace each other with tears, and then with dignity and heroism complete the work of harakiri. ‘They died like dewdrops on the flowers of spring.’ When Ukyo’s unhappy mother received the sign of the self-destruction of her son--a tuft of his hair--she lost her reason and drowned herself.”
Dr. Haack, who gives the above two summaries, says that according to J. Schedel, these two romances “were till a few years ago classic reading-lessons in the Japanese schools!”
But Nanshok Okagami (the Great Mirror of Man’s Love) seems to be the most classical collection of such tales. It appeared first in 1687; and its author, Saikaku, has for two centuries had great renown in Japan, as a creative artist and poetic realist; and though in his later period the re-issue of his works has been prohibited, it may be said of him that - “Pornography was by no means the purpose of his literary activity, but rather an untampered reproduction of real life, to which, of course, a poetical side may always be found. His works are wanting neither in charming freshness, nor in deep feeling, nor in poetic beauty.”[101] Saikaku describes, in one place, the loves of the young Okura and the eighteen-year-old Geki--both sons of Shinto priests. “For two years this comrade-alliance lasted, and during this time they were together night and day. One of them was never seen alone. It was only with the death of Okura that the tie was broken. Geki, however, was then adopted by Okura’s father, and the latter’s daughter was given to him for wife.” As models of such lovers, Saikaku draws the picture of Mondo and Hanimon, the one aged sixty-three, and the other sixty-six. They learned to know and love each other when the first counted only sixteen years, while the second was nineteen years old and had already gone through his course of military instruction. For almost fifty years they lived thus, as bachelors, in an ever renewed freshness of intimacy.”
Dr. Von Meyer, in a book by his friend Elisar von Kupffer, gives a translation of a few pages from the story of Tamura by Saikak--which may be reproduced here as an example of a rather more sentimental and less heroic tale of Samurai love. Kanimon Maruo, whose dress betrays that he is a Samurai, falls in love, while on an angling excursion, with a good-looking youth named Sannojo Tamura, connected with the family of the Daimyo of Koriyama. One evening, late, the latter has to return, and by a somewhat dangerous route, from a theatrical performance which he has attended. “As Tamura reached the vicinity of Daianji (a well-known temple) there came from a side-path a man in the style of a servant, with a cowl over his head and a lantern in his hand, who walked on in front of him. And by the help of this guide, whom he gladly followed, Tamura soon reached Koriyama. The man indeed went as far as Tamura’s house in Takata-Machi, and then turned back again when he saw Tamura enter his home. So far Tamura had not paid much attention, but now the affair seemed really strange. He looked, however, to his parents first, and let them know of his return from the theatre. Having done this, he went out again and hastened after the lantern, and at length over-took it. By the glimmer of the lantern he caught sight of a robe of chrysanthemum pattern. And now guessing that this must be the Samurai whom he had met once before, by day, he followed the light closer; but in the vicinity of Nara it slowly dwindled and went out, and in the pitch darkness the keenest eyesight could perceive nothing. Presently a voice became audible:--’Art thou not perhaps an attendant of the young nobleman, sent to make enquiries, seeing he was accompanied by a person in disguise?’ But Tamura knew the voice and said:--’I have followed thee back again so far, because I have learned to know thy heart,’ and he grasped Maruo’s hand. To Maruo it seemed all like a dream, and for a time he stood quite still and unable to speak.
‘Is it all true?’ he said.
‘I am grateful to thee for thy friendliness,’ replied Tamura.
‘Do not let thy feeling change!’
‘My feeling shall not change.’
‘Forget me not!’
‘I will never forget thee.’
And so as they exchanged many such words, the clock of Kiyo in the West struck two; and as it was deep night they remained there and entertained each other in the darkness; and before dawn they made ready to return--though in truth their parting came too soon. Each wished for a favorable opportunity of meeting again. Maruo accompanied Tamura back again, and on the way they spoke of how uncertain life is. ‘No one can count on the cherry-tree blooming a second time, that is why the ripe cherry is so beautiful!’ And so they made an appointment for the second day of March.”
And now Maruo catches a chill and dies. Tamura, unsuspecting, arrives on the appointed day, only to hear of the disaster. He goes to Maruo’s house, and finds the corpse already on its bier, and praying beside it a young man whose name proves to be Sanai. Amid tears and lamentations the two young men make acquaintance. Tamura insists that he will put an end to his life, in order not to be separated from Maruo. Sanai, not without much difficulty, dissuades him; and finally out of their common love for Maruo the two become close friends. They unite their lives, and one night the spirit of Maruo appears to the two sleepers and blesses their union.
Dr. Haack rightly says,[102] with regard to this and the other works of Saikaku: - “How is it possible to justify the complete neglect of this literature? Saikaku’s work does not only belong to the history of literature generally, but is also a mine of information for the history of Japanese culture, such as can only be left out of consideration by wilful suppression of the truth.”
It is hardly possible to study the above and other accounts of the Samurai Institution in Japan without being struck by its resemblance (already noticed) to the Dorian military comradeship. Though the comrade-alliances of knight and knightling were quite commonly recognised in Japan, they never became exactly an institution of the State as they were in Sparta and Crete; but they obviously had their profound influence and result in sealing and confirming the lofty standard of honour represented by Bushido.
Dr. Friedrich Kraus, in his book on Japan,[103] describes the comrade-relation there between knight and youth as of the same noble type as among the early Greeks; and he goes on to say that similar relations continue to-day in the army, as between officers and soldiers, and that many a time on the battlefields of Manchuria during the last war they inspired contempt of death or willing devotion of life for the sake of a loved friend.
I may say that a friend of my own who took part in the same war confirms this view, and Karsch-Haack says [104]: - “If it is true, as eye-witnesses of the campaign have declared, that comrade-love is still--as a legacy from the Samurai--much favored in both the Japanese army and navy, and that it has contributed not a little to the marvelous results of their late war with Russia--why then one can hardly reject as unjustifiable the opinion that this love is more likely to encourage manly bearing than to stand in the way of the same.”
Conclusion
IT may seem rather too late--at the close of a book--to criticise its title! But in the present case perhaps this is the best place for the purpose. It may have occurred to readers of the foregoing pages that the word “Intermediate” hardly covers all the human types dealt with or spoken of. Between the quite normal man and the quite normal woman there are certainly a number of intermediate grades. There are men who approach women more or less in their sex-temperament and other respects--who are feminine or even effeminate in their various degrees; and there are women who approach men--who are somewhat masculine or even virile; and specimens of all these degrees have passed before us. But there are other types which can hardly be called “intermediate.” If there are men who vary from the normal man-type in the feminine direction-and who may perhaps be termed “subvirile”--there are also men who vary in the opposite direction, and may be called “supervirile.” If there are women who are less feminine than the normal woman, there are also other women who are “ultra-feminine.” These types--these superviriles and ultra-feminines--are not between but beyond the normal boundaries. And not only should we theoretically conclude on the existence of such types, but practically we discover them, both around us to-day, and among the various peoples of the past.
There are certainly some men of amazing virility--great fighters, organisers, thinkers--powerful both in muscle and brain--who seem in their love-relations to stand to the ordinary man much as the latter does to the woman. Prof. Gustav Jaeger[105] said, in 1884: - “What struck me most at first, but now appears to be perfectly explicable and natural, is that among the homosexuals are to be found the most remarkable specimens of men, namely those that I call supervirile. Such men stand by virtue of a special variation of their soul-stuff as much above the man as the normally sexual man does above the woman. Such a man is able by virtue of his soul-aroma to bewitch men, just as they, in the passive way, bewitch him. And as he lives almost always in the society of men, and men cast themselves at his feet, it often happens that such a supervirile mounts to the highest grades of mental and spiritual development, of social position, and of masculine ability.” Dr. Jaeger then gives a strong list of generals, sovereigns, philosophers, artists, etc. as examples.
Allowing something for a kind of enthusiastic exaggeration in this passage, and something also for the use of the invidious word “above” when “beyond” perhaps would have been more to the point, we may say that Dr. Jaeger’s remarks of thirty years ago have, on the whole, been corroborated and accepted by modern thought; and refering to the present volume we may fairly suppose that the Dorian Greeks or the Japanese Samurai must have counted among them men of such a “supervirile” quality as he describes.
Similarly among the women alluded to here and there in the first chapter above, there would doubtless be some ultra-feminine--who would stand in their love-relation to the ordinary woman much as the latter does to the normal man. In both these cases the term “intermediate” is not quite the fitting one; and I can only ask the reader to excuse its use in consideration of the difficulty of finding a term which really covers all the ground. I must also acknowledge a similar deficiency in the use of the expression “Primitive Folk” in the title. The expression is somewhat too narrow, and requires a good deal of stretching in order to include the early Greek and Japanese civilisations; but I failed to find a better one to hand.
There is another point which may be mentioned here. As we have seen that the varieties of human type, intermediate and other, are very numerous, almost endless, so we shall do well to keep in mind that the varieties of love and sex-relation between individuals of these types are almost endless, and cannot be dispatched in sweeping generalisations--whether such relations be normal or homosexual.
The British mind, curiously enough, if the latter are mentioned as occurring among men, immediately flies to one only conclusion--the same in fact as that indicated by the translators of the Bible in dealing with the word “Kedeshim” (supra, p. 29) and the common repugnance to the idea of masculine love in this country is no doubt largely due to this view--since no great repugnance seems to be felt to the idea of feminine amours. Now it would be absurd and insincere to say that this mode of familiarity does not occur; but it is certain that in love-relations between men in the Western world, it is comparatively rare and only to be found in a small percentage of cases; and there is plenty of evidence to show that even in the primitive world of which we have been speaking it was by no means always implied. If one reads Xenophon, for instance, speaking as a contemporary of the Dorian customs in Sparta, one finds that he expressly denies the implication. Nor in foreign countries to-day does the British view hold.
In Germany and Italy a quite devoted or passionate love between men is recognised without people necessarily assuming this particular expression of it. And the common view here affords a strange glimpse into the working of the British mind, and has even led some foreigners to form a quite unfavorable, and probably false, conclusion as to our actual habits.
However this may be, I think the facts put forward in the preceding papers about the early social life of the world will never be understood in their right light, and their real import recognised, until it is perceived that love in a very true and deep human sense lay at the root of most of the institutions described, and became through them the source of vital developments to humanity. Sex, of course, has its perfect rights to expression and consideration--and no sensible person would wish to deny these; but we feel that love is the real thing on which human nobility rests. When we once clearly see: and understand that--as for example through the Dorian or the Samurai institutions--it will doubtless become easier to understand some of the more remote and primitive institutions dealt with in the first chapter, on divination, etc.
One common cause of misunderstanding in these matters is that in most cases where the modern mind has to deal with ancient customs, of peoples far back and alien from ourselves, we may indeed know the outer forms, but we are profoundly ignorant of the real feelings and emotions which underlay and inspired them; and we easily fall into a way, on the one hand, of falsely interpreting the forms, and on the other hand, of ignoring their inner meaning altogether.
There has been a tendency for instance--and that no doubt derived largely from the Jewish Bible--to dismiss the more or less sexual worships of Syria and Babylonia as mere unadulterated wickedness and licentiousness; but is this not largely because we have so little means of seeing from within what they really meant to those who took part in them? The rite of Venus Mylitta, as described by Herodotus (Book i. 199), by which every woman was “obliged, once in her life, to sit in the temple of Venus and have intercourse with some stranger,” sounds at a first reading like a mere glorification of prostitution, and has led to much horrified holding up of hands; but when one turns to the further account by the same author (Book i. 131, 132), one sees that the worship must have had great and admirable elements in it. It was associated with sacrifice to the sun and moon and the great powers of Nature, and “he that sacrifices is not permitted to pray for blessings for himself alone; but is obliged to offer prayers for the prosperity of all.” Richard Burton, referring to this custom in The Thousand Nights and a Night (1886, Vol. x., p. 231), says “It was a mere consecration of a tribal rite. Everywhere girls before marriage belong either to the father or 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. . . . It is noticed by Justin (xviii., c. 5), and it probably explains the Succoth Benoth, or damsels’ booths, which the Babylonians transplanted to the cities of Samaria.”
Or one may refer in the same connection to the well-known passage in Captain Cook’s First Voyage (Hawkesworth ii. 128), where he describes the rites of Venus performed as a religious ceremony in Otaheite between a young man and a girl, in public “before several of our people and a great number of the natives; but, as appeared, in perfect conformity to the custom of the place. Among the spectators were several women of superior rank, who may properly be said to have assisted at the ceremony, for they gave instruction to the girl how to perform her part.” Here evidently a ceremony indecent in the eyes of white folk excited respect and reverence in the natives themselves.
Or again, we have quoted the Father Lafitau (ch. i., supra) on the extraordinary customs of the American Indians and their connection with religion, which he compares with similar features in the old worships of Cybele or Venus Urania; and anyone might superficially suppose that he dismisses all these customs as examples of mere license. Yet in another passage of his book (vol. 1, p. 607) he compares the friendships of the Indians to the heroic friendships of Greece, and after mentioning some of these latter, he continues: - “The Brazilians call friends of this kind Atour-assap, i.e., the perfect ally (“le parfait allié”). The Sieur de Léri (Léri, Hist. du Brésil, ch. xx.) assures us that the alliance which is formed between them by this sort of union is so strong that all their possessions become absolutely in common, as if they really were but one person; and that the one cannot after that marry into the family of the other, within the prohibited degrees, any more than if they were blood relations of the first degree.”
“Among the Indians of North America,” Lafitau further says: “these friendship-relations do not exhibit any appearance of vice, although there is--or may be--a good deal of this in fact. They are very ancient in their origin, very marked and constant in their form, sacred almost, if I may say so, in respect of the union which they compose, and of which the bonds are as closely knit as those of blood and of nature. Nor can they be dissolved unless indeed one of the two, rendering himself unworthy by such cowardices as would dishonour his friend, should force the latter to renounce the alliance--a thing which some missionaries have assured me they have witnessed examples of. The relatives of the friends are the first to encourage these alliances, and to respect their rights and duties; and the selections are honorable in character, being founded on mutual merit according to their idea, on conformity of customs, and on a kind of rivalry which makes each one wish to be the friend of those who are well thought of and justly honoured.”
“These friendships are gained by presents made by the one to such other as he desires to have as friend; they are maintained by mutual tokens of good will; and the friends remain companions of the chase, of war, and of fortune; and have the right to food and hospitality each in the cabin of the other. The warmest compliments indeed that one can make to the other is to give him this name of friend; and these friendships mature with advancing age, and are so closely connected that one often finds among them a heroism similar to that of Orestes and Pylades.” (Lafitau concludes this passage by quoting stories, told him by the missionaries, of such Indian friends refusing to be separated and insisting on dying together.)
Such evidence as this does not point to a state of unadulterated wickedness! And in fact may we not say that it is extremely improbable that any great people that has left an abiding mark upon the world has had its institutions and religion built upon mere sexual licence? Would it not argue indeed a great want of perception in anyone to suppose such a thing? We may, however, say this, that probably for these earlier folk who lived so much more out in the great open of Nature than we do, and who also lived, mentally speaking, in the great open of the tribal life of their fellows, their outlook on the world was in many respects far saner than ours. There was probably less disease both of body and mind, and many things were clean to them which for us have become soiled and unclean. There was a religion of the body, and a belief in the essential sacredness of all its processes, which we somehow have lost--and which we shall not probably socially regain until we once more adopt the free life of the open air and restore the healing and gracious sense of human community and solidarity.
Bearing this in mind it becomes possible to see that a great many of the customs we have mentioned, whether in Syria or Babylonia, or in Greece or in Africa, or in North and South America, had a value quite other than that which appears at first sight--a profound and human value--and that they represented necessary contributions towards the evolution of mankind and the expression of its latent powers. And as regards the present volume, I think we may say that the general result of the enquiries contained in it is to show that among primitive folk variations of sex-temperament from the normal have not been negligible freaks, but have played an important part in the evolution and expansion of human society--that in a certain sense variations of social activity have run parallel with and been provoked by variations in sex-temperament.
We have seen that among early peoples the quite normal man is warrior and hunter, and the quite normal woman house-wife and worker-round-the-house; and it is quite conceivable that if no intermediate types had arisen, human society might have remained stationary in these simple occupations. But when types of men began to appear who had no taste for war and slaughter--men, perhaps, of a more gentle or feminine disposition; or when types of women arose who chafed at the slavery of the house, and longed for the open field of adventure and activity--women, in fact, of a more masculine tendency-then necessarily and quite naturally these new-comers had to find, and found, for themselves new occupations and new activities. The intermediate types of human beings created intermediate spheres of social life and work. And we have seen that there is abundant evidence to show (what, of course, all physiology and modern thought would lead us to expect) that these variations of the general human type commonly sprang from, or at least were most intimately associated with, variations of the sex-temperament itself; or perhaps we should say of the germ-plasm which lies at the back of the sex-temperament. We have seen over and over again in the preceding pages that peculiar classes of men and women, diverging from the normal in their sex-customs and habits, became the repositories and foci of new kinds of learning and skill, of new activities and accomplishments. Thus the foundational occupations of human life--such as fighting, hunting, child-rearing, and agriculture--having been laid down by the normal sex types, it was largely the intermediate types who developed the superstructure. The priest or medicine-man or shaman was at first the sole representative of this new class, and we have seen that he was almost invariably, in some degree or other, of Uranian temperament.
His work, to begin with, was prophetic or divinatory; but this soon branched out on the one hand into rude poetry, drama, dance and song--what we should call Art--and on the other into elementary observation of the stars and the seasons, medicine and the herbs--what we should call Science. The temples became centres of learning and of the development of the arts and crafts. And a god who combined in some degree the attributes of both male and female was commonly worshipped in their courts.
So far with regard to the sex-types that may be called truly intermediate. But we have touched on the existence also of types quite beyond the normal at either end of the scale--namely the supervirile man and the ultra-feminine woman. We have seen that the facts now accessible suggest that the supervirile type of man has done great service to the world in furnishing it not only with superb individuals--generals, organisers, and leaders of men; but also with powerful and noble races and classes like the Dorians or the Samurai. There is a certain a priori probability in this theory, but it waits for further study and development. Finally we have the ultra-feminine woman whose special mission to society may perhaps turn out to reside in works of charity and mercy; but this type has at present been but little studied or considered, and before pronouncing any opinion it would be wise to wait and see what the actual facts may indicate.
THE END
Footnotes
[1] 2 vols. (Macmillan, 1908), vol. ii., p. 458.
[2] See also Bancroft’s Native Races of the Pacific States, vol. i., p. 82.
[3] Moeurs des Sauvages Ameriquains, comparées aux moeurs des premiers temps, par le p. Lafitau (Paris, 1724).
[4] Wm. A. Hammond in American Journal of Neurology and Psychiatry (August, 1882), p. 339.
[5] See Dr. Karsch, Jahrbuch Sex. Zwisch, vol. iii., p. 142.
[6] First Missionary Voyage to the South Sea Islands (London, 1799), p. 200.
[7] 2 vols. (London, 1829).
[8] See chapters v., vi., and vii. in this vol.
[9] History and Antiquities of the Doric Race, vol. i., p. 338.
[10] See infra, ch. viii., p. 12.
[11] The Thousand Nights and a Night (1886), vol. x., p. 229.
[12] See Frazer’s Adonis, Attis and Osiris (2nd edition, 1907), pp. 14, 64 note, etc.
[13] Ibid., p. 67.
[14] See Frazer’s Adonis, p. 14, note, etc.
[15] See a full consideration of this subject in Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism, by Thomas Inman (2nd edition, 1874), p. 120 et seq. Also a long article by A. E. Whatham in The American Journal of Religious Psychology and Education, for July, 1911, on “The Sign of the Mother-goddess.”
[16] See Westermarck’s Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, vol. ii., p. 488.
[17] All this suggests the practice of some early and primitive science, and much resembles the accusations made in the thirteenth century against our Roger Bacon, pioneer of modern science.
[18] Adonis, etc. p. 60.
[19] Ibid., p. 66.
[20] See T. Karsch-Haack, Forschungen über gleichgeschlechtliche Liebe (Munich), Die Japaner, p. 77. Also The Letters of Fr. Xavier, translated into German by Joseph Burg (3 vols., 1836-40).
[21] See la Chronica del Peru, by Cieza de Leon (Antwerp, 1554), ch. 64.
[22] Op. cit., p. 243. 34
[23] See Uranismus bei den Naturvölkern, Dr. F. Karsch., in “Jahrbuch für Sexuellen Zwischenstufen,” vol. iii., pp. 161, 162.
[24] See Maxn. Prinz zu Wied, Reise in das innere N. America (2 vols., 1819 and 1841), vol. ii., p. 133.
[25] Hakluyt Society (3 vols.), vol. ii., p. 458.
[26] Adonis, etc., p. 428.
[27] See, in these connections, Dr. Hirschfeld’s remarkable book Die Transvestiten (Berlin, 1910); also Die Konträre Sexual-empfindung, by Dr. A. Moll (edition 1893), pp. 82-90.
[28] See Prinz zu Wied, op. cit., vol. ii., p. 133.
[29] Berlin, 1912.
[30] The Chances of Death and other studies, by Karl Pearson (2 Vols., 1897), vol. ii., p. 13.
[31] See above, pp. 25 and 32, etc.
[32] 2 vols. (Paris, 1840).
[33] It is probable also that the considerable degree of continence, to which many homosexuals are by nature or external necessity compelled, contributes to this visionary faculty.
[34] Indorum Floridam provinciam inhabitantium eicones, etc. (Frankfurt, 1591). Also translation of the same with heliotypes of the engravings (Boston, J. R. Osgood & Co., 1875.)
[35] P. F. X. de Charlevoix, La Nouvelle France, 2 vols. (Paris, 1744).
[36] De Pauw, Recherches sur les Américains, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1768).
[37] See for his Report, The New York Medical Journal, Vol. L., No. 23 (7th Dec., 1889).
[38] Jahrbuch für s.Z., Vol. iii., p, 138.
[39] Quoted from the Yajur-Veda. See Bible Folk-lore: a study in Comp. Mythology (London, 1884), p. 104.
[40] See Adam’s Peak to Elephanta, by E. Carpenter (1903), p. 308.
[41] See drawings in Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism, by Thomas Inman (London, 1874).
[42] These and some other references are taken from the learned and careful study “Ueber die androgynische Idee des Lebens,” by Dr. von Römer, of Amsterdam, which is to be found in vol. v. of the Jahrbuch für Sexuelle Zwischenstufen (Leipzig, 1903).
[43] Sacred Books of the East, vol. xv., p. 85.
[44] See H. p. Blavatsky, Secret Doctrine, vol. ii., p. 132, quoted in vol. v., Jahrbuch für S. Z., p. 76.
[45] Inman’s Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism (Trubner, 1874), p. 119.
[46] Pagan Christs, by John M. Robertson (1908), p. 308.
[47] Ibid., p. 307.
[48] The Thousand Nights and a Night (1886), vol. x., p. 231.
[49] See illustration, Jahrbuch für S.Z., vol. v., p. 732.
[50] See his study already quoted, Jahrbuch, pp. 735-744.
[51] See Jahrbuch, as above, pp. 806, 807 and 809.
[52] Adonis, etc., p. 432
[53] Ibid., p. 431.
[54] Compare the undifferentiated sex-tendencies of boys and girls at puberty and shortly after.
[55] Ali Muhammed, who called himself the Bâb (or Gate), was born at Shiraz in 1820. In 1844 he commenced preaching his gospel, which was very like that of Jesus, and which now has an immense following. In 1850 he was shot, at Tabriz, as a malefactor, and his beloved disciple Mirza Muhammed Ali, refusing to leave him, was shot with him.
[56] 2 vols., translated from the German by G. Cornewall Lewis (John Murray, 1830).
[57] In the Rheinisches Museum, vol. lxii., pp. 438-475.
[58] History and Antiquities of the Doric Race, Book iv., ch. 4, p. 6; see also E. Carpenter’s Ioläus, pp. 16-19.
[59] Strabo, Book x., ch. 4, p. 21 (Bohn’s edition of the classics).
[60] Müller maintains the general chastity of the institution, quoting Xenophon and others; but Bethe contests this, referring to Plato (The Laws) and Aristotle (vol. ii. 10), where it is suggested that one of its objects was the prevention of overpopulation. Probably in this, as in other such cases, it is impossible to make any very definite statement. Whatever general theories there might be, practice would vary widely from place to place and from people to people, and public opinion would do the same.
[61] See Hahn’s Albanesische Studien, vol. i., p. 166, where considerable light altogether is thrown on the Dorian comradeship.
[62] See Studies of the Greek Poets, by J. A. Symonds, vol. i., p. 97.
[63] See Plutarch’s Eroticus, his Lives, etc.
[64] See Plutarch’s Solon, ch. i.
[65] Published by John Lane (London, 1893).
[66] Lowes Dickinson, The Greek View of Life, p. 97.
[67] Dacier’s translation, vol. i.
[68] Translation by M. J. Chapman (London, 1836).
[69] Müller, op. cit., vol. ii., p. 327.
[70] Dacier’s Plutarch, vol. I., p. 215.
[71] Though as regards the latter, Symonds suggests (A Problem in Greek Ethics, p. 2) that in camp-life this may have been one contributing cause.
[72] See The Greek View of Life, p. 161.
[73] Civilisation: its Cause and Cure, by E. Carpenter, p. 26.
[74] Dacier’s translation of Plutarch.
[75] Bethe, op. cit., p. 442.
[76] Bethe, op. cit., p. 440.
[77] Op. cit., ii., 229. See also Plutarch’s Lycurgus, ch. xv.
[78] See the quotation above (ch. v., p. 94) from Strabo: “They do not regard as an object of affection a youth exceedingly handsome, but him who is distinguished for courage and decorum (ἀνδρέιᾳ καὶ κοσμιότητι).”
[79] The Dantesque and Platonic Ideals of Love, in the Key of Blue (John Lane, 1893).
[80] See Aelian 7, iii., 12--who says that the Spartan boys would beg a man ἐισπνε̃ιν ἀυτο̃ις.
[81] See Thera, by Hiller von Gaertringen (3 vols., Berlin, 1899).
[82] Bethe, p. 450.
[83] See for these, H. von Gaertringen, I. G., xii., 3, 536-601, etc.
[84] Thera, vol. iii., p. 67 et seq.
[85] Πhειδιππιδας ωιπhε Τιμαγορας, and Ναι τον Δελπhινιον hο Κρίμων τειδε ωιπhε παιδα Βαθυκλεος. These inscriptions are in an archaic script which cannot exactly be reproduced here, but the readings given are as near as available in the later alphabet--a modern “h” being used for the old Greek aspirate.
[86] With regard to this invocation of Apollo, see above, ch. i., page 27. Apollo was the special god of comradeship; as Delphinios he was the source of divination; as Karneios he links on to the Syrian Ashteroth Karnaim, the feminine principle. Nor must it be forgotten that Thera had already been at an earlier date a Phœnician or Syrian colony, and that here was a point of contact between the Dorian and the Syrian festivals.
[87] In the Jahrbuch für Sexuelle Zwischenstufen, vol. ix., p. 328.
[88] Thera, in fact, occupied for the Dorian Greeks much the same position as Delos did for the Ionians: of which Mr. H. B. Cotterill (Ancient Greece, p. 152) says, “This island, lying in the midst of the Cyclades, which offer easy transit between Greece and Ionia, was in early times an important entrepôt. It was also the religious centre of the Ionian world, famed as the birthplace of Artemis and Apollo and for the most ancient oracle of the god. Every fifth year the birth of the twin deities was celebrated with magnificence amid a great concourse, vividly described in the ancient Hymn to Apollo: ‘Hither gather the long-robed Ionians with their children and chaste wives. They wrestle, they dance, they sing, in memory of the god. He who saw them would say they were immortal and ageless, so much grace and charm would he find in viewing the men, the fair-girdled women, the swift ships, and riches of every kind.’ These festivals seem to have been accompanied by contests in music and poetry.”
[89] Bethe, op. cit. p. 450.
[90] See Plutarch’s Pelopidas, ch. xviii.
[91] See Love’s Coming of Age, by E. Carpenter, p. 17.
[92] See Bethe, op. cit., p. 464 et seq.
[93] See Aelian 8, iii. 10.
[94] Simpkin and Marshall, 2/6.
[95] Bushido, p. 26.
[96] Yoshitsuné was brother to Yoritomo (above mentioned), who was one of the first and most renowned of the Samurai. Yoshitsuné and his retainer Benkei were inseparable, and together they performed such feats of heroism that Yoritomo became jealous of their fame, and tried to chase them from the land. Adopting many disguises and in constant peril of their lives they wandered far and passed through many adventures, till at last they died together in a wild country in the North of Japan.
[97] Bushido, pp. 107, 108.
[98] In the Jahrbuch für homosexuelle Zwischenstufen, Vol. iv. (1902), p. 265 et seq.
[99] Forschungen ueber gleichgeschlechtliche Liebe (Munich, 1906), p. 79.
[100] The explanation is reported by Dr. Karsch-Haack as having been verbally given to him by a commercial man residing in Japan.
[101] Karsch-Haack, op. cit., p. 115.
[102] Op. cit., p. 117.
[103] Das Geschlechtsleben der Japaner (Leipzig, 1911).
[104] Op. cit., p. 121.
[105] In the third part of his Lehrbuch der allgemeinen Zoologie.