The Sexual Life of Our Time in Its Relations to Modern Civilization / Translated from the Sixth German Edition

by Iwan Bloch

CHAPTER VI

If, with Friedrich Ratzel, we understand by civilization the sum total of all the mental acquirements of a period, then also human love, this specific product of civilization, is merely a mirrored picture of the mental activities of the existing epoch of civilization. We can follow this way of the spirit in love from the primitive age down to the present day, and we can detect, in each successive epoch of civilization, the association with sexuality of peculiar spiritual states; and after thus passing in review the thousands of years of human history, we can discern once more in our own epoch the individual psychical elements which characterize the love of modern civilized man.

The increasing spiritualization and idealization of sensuality in the course of civilization, notwithstanding the persistence of the elementary intensity of the sexual impulse, is associated with the fact to which we have already alluded—namely, the preponderance of the brain characteristic of the genus homo—a preponderance which was unquestionably gradually acquired, and arose in consequence of an accumulation of original variations which gave their possessors a certain advantage in the struggle for existence.

Thus very gradually the primary, instinctive, still powerful animal ego underwent expansion into the secondary ego (in Meynert’s sense), into the spiritual personality, to which a fixed foundation was given by the possession of speech. With some justice the origin of speech has been singled out as extremely significant for the development of the feeling of love; and the conquest of the primitive animal instinct has been, above all, attributed to this faculty. A. Cabral, in his interesting work, “La Vénus Génitrix” (Paris, 1882, p. 155), expresses the opinion that speech and song developed solely on account of sexual relations; and he alludes in support of this view to the well-known manifold noises made by various animals in conditions of sexual excitement. It is very significant in this connexion that anthropological science has proved, as an important fact in racial psychology, that the development of poetry preceded that of prose.[33] The original form of speech was rhythmical noise, a poem, a song. And we saw above that this was subservient to more suggestive purposes, and, above all, to sexual allurement. Thus the primitive natural connexion between speech and sexuality appears somewhat probable. With these earlier erotic noises and alluring tones were subsequently associated the first elements of intellectual comprehension, the first thoughts.

This “withdrawal of mankind from pure instinct,” which Schiller, in his essay on the earliest human society, describes as the “most fortunate and most important occurrence in human history,” from which time the struggle towards freedom may be said to begin, gradually enabled the higher feeling-tones of sensation to become more predominant. The elementary impulses became associated with sensations of pleasure and pain as psychical reactions. The “organic sensations” entered the sphere of consciousness, and so gave rise, in association and reciprocal working with the higher sensory stimuli, to the psychico-emotional roots of the impulses. Thus, in the sexual sphere, out of pure voluptuousness, the simple instinctive impulse towards copulation, arose love, whose essence is an intimate association of physical sensations with feelings and thoughts, with the entire spiritual and emotional being of mankind.[34]

“Love,” says Charles Albert, “is the result of all the forward steps of human activity in all departments, and in every direction, as manifested in their effects upon the sexual life. It is an advance which goes hand in hand with all other advances. Man is an inseparable whole, and in theory only can he be subdivided into separate faculties. In reality, indeed, all departments of human development are so intimately associated that progress in any one of them must place something to the credit of all.”

Increasing psychical refinement and differentiation of the human type, domination of the intelligence and of emotion over brute force, transformation of the social relations between man and woman in consequence of economic conditions or of religious and moral ideas, respect for personality, a secured provision for the most pressing vital needs, and a consequent elevation and complication of the sexual life, the influence of a longing for ideal beauty in a psychical and moral sense—all these and much more have contributed to constitute sexual love in the sense in which we understand and experience it at the present day. The speech of the lover of our own time is the comprehensive expression of all human progress. The difference between animal rutting and the lofty sensation of love corresponds exactly to the gulf which separates primitive man, capable only of chipping for himself a few almost useless flint tools, from civilized man who, with the aid of innumerable machines, has tamed to his service the elementary forces of Nature.

We must recur to the earliest beginnings of the evolution of the human psyche in its association with sexuality, in order to understand the profound and primitive connexion between the bodily and the spiritual formative impulse; this connexion has been expressed by the saying that the sexual impulse is the father of all those intellectual impulses peculiar to man which have made him a thinker and a discoverer. In the time of Schelling’s natural philosophy, they went so far as to speak of the “testicular hemispheres” as analogous to the hemispheres of the brain. And is not this connexion also expressed etymologically (in German) in the verbal association of Zeugung (procreation) and Ueberzeugung (certainty, i.e., higher, or intellectual, procreation), and, further, by the fact that in the Hebrew tongue the ideas of “procreation” and “cognition” are jointly represented by a single term? And, returning to the physical sphere, it may be mentioned that, according to Moebius (“Ueber die Wirkungen der Kastration”—“Concerning the Effects of Castration,” Halle, 1906), sexuality is the common product of testicular and cerebral activity.

Plato was already aware of this relationship when he called thought a sublimated sexual impulse, and Buffon likewise when he described love as “le premier essor de la sensibilité, qui se porte ensuite à d’autres objets.” In more recent times, Dr. Santlus, in his valuable essay, “On the Psychology of the Human Impulses” (Archiv für Psychiatrie, 1864, vol. vi., pp. 244 and 262), alluded to this combination of the sexual sphere with the highest spiritual interests of mankind under the name of the “function-impulse.”

From these intimate relations between sexual and spiritual productivity is to be explained the remarkable fact that certain spiritual creations may take the place of the purely physical sexual impulse; that there are psychical sexual equivalents into which the potential energy of the sexual impulse may be transformed. Here belong numerous emotions, such as ferocity, anger, pain, and the productive spiritual activities which find their vent in poetry, art, and religion—in short, the whole imaginative life of mankind in the widest sense is able, when the natural activity of the sexual impulse is inhibited, to find such sexual equivalents, the importance of which in the evolutionary history of human love we shall have later to study in further detail.

Interesting observations regarding this intimate connexion between the spiritual and the physical procreative impulse are to be found in the work of a thinker who made no secret of his intense sensuality, and in whose life and thought sexuality played a peculiar part—in the work of Schopenhauer. In his “New Paralipomena” he lays stress on the similarity between the work of productive genius and the modification of the sexual impulse peculiar to the human race. In another place in which, as Frauenstädt also insists, he is speaking from personal experience, he writes: “In the days and hours when the voluptuous impulse is most powerful, not a dull desire, arising from emptiness and dullness of the consciousness, but a burning longing, a violent ardour, precisely then also are the highest powers of the spirit available, the finest consciousness is prepared for its intensest activity, although at the moment when the consciousness has given itself up to desire they are latent; but it needs merely a powerful effort to turn their direction, and instead of that tormenting, despairing lust (the kingdom of darkness), the activity of the highest spiritual powers fills the consciousness (the kingdom of light).”

Georg Hirth, who, in the section of his “Ways to Love” entitled “Stark-naked Thoughts,” gives in aphorisms an interesting account of the psychology of love, affirms the “delightful phenomenon of a peculiarly active enhancement of our impulse to thought and production,” after erotic satisfaction, after a fortunate love-night. Very ably, also, has Mantegazza described the spiritual activity produced by a happy and victorious love.[35]

Many great thinkers have complained of the alleged impairment of pure spirituality by the sexual life, and have recommended asceticism in order to arrive at a truer internal enlightenment. This, however, would imply pulling up the roots of spiritual poietic[36] activity, the suppression of a rich inner life of thought and feeling, the destruction of all true poetry and art. There would be left behind only the wilderness of a cold abstraction. Look at the letters of Abelard before and after his emasculation. Sexuality first breathes into our spiritual being the warm and blooming life.

“The world,” says Philipp Frey, “would be conceived by us in sharply bounded intellectual pictures, unless we saw it in the changing lights of our sexuality. From the green of gently dreaming desire, through the yellow of surging emotion, and from the blood-red of eager desire to the cool blue of satisfaction—all things appear to us in the light of our sexuality. Life would be better ordered if we were purely intelligible machines for the purposes of nutrition, work, and production. But without the dualism of desire and satisfaction, the world would become torpid in a great yawn.”

This intimate connexion between the psychic-emotional being and the sexual impulse gave rise to a deepening, a concentration, and an increasing intensity, of the feeling of love, whereby the latter becomes the most powerful influence affecting mankind in bodily and spiritual relations. Voltaire, in his “Pensées Philosophiques,” says aptly: “L’amour est de toutes les passions la plus forte, parce qu’elle attaque à la fois la tête, le cœur, et le corps.” That it is in love that the immediate admixture of organic processes most clearly manifests itself is a fact pointed out already by Aristotle, and among modems emphasized by Griesinger.[37]

Thus love discloses itself as a nucleus, the axis of the individual, and therewith also of the social life, a fact indicated already in Schopenhauer’s phrase, describing love as the “focus of the will,” and in Weismann’s expression “the continuity of the germ-plasma.” And we can easily understand that there are literary advocates of a consequent “sexual philosophy,” who base their view of the universe solely and entirely upon the sexual. To them the sexual problem becomes a world problem, eroticism expands into metaphysics. These sexual philosophers start from love to unveil the mysteries of life. The most celebrated advocate of such a sexual philosophy was the Marquis de Sade, of whom I have myself given an account in a pseudonymous work entitled “New Researches concerning the Marquis de Sade” (Berlin, 1904). According to de Sade, it is only through the sexual that the world can be grasped and understood.

In a certain sense the antipodes of the Marquis de Sade is a remarkable sexual philosopher of our own time, the author of “Sex and Character,” Dr. Otto Weininger. His whole circle of thought also revolves exclusively round the sexual. It forms the basis, the starting-point of his exposition; though, indeed, it does so in a purely negative sense. For Weininger is the apostle of asexuality; to him the highest type of human being is the non-sexual, the one who renounces all sexuality. And woman, as the incorporation of sexuality, is to him “nothingness,” the “radically evil” which must be annihilated.

A positive sexual philosopher of a nobler kind than these two anomalous spirits is Max Zeiss, whose book, “Ragnarök, a Philosophico-Social Study,” was published at Strasburg in 1904. He regards work, effort, creation, the strife for material position, for honour and renown, only as subordinate aims for the attainment of one aim—love.

The ever more intimate association of love with the spiritual life, its increasing depth, the inclusion within its sphere of influence of all feelings and thoughts, necessarily give rise to a stronger development of the feeling of individual personality, which, in contrast with the earlier instinctive impulse, came more and more to dominate the amatory life. Now love gained at least an equal importance for the individual that in former conditions it had for the purposes of reproduction, and therewith subjectively the reproductive idea was unquestionably thrust into the background, in comparison with the idea of personal living, of personal enrichment and development, by means of love. Hegel says aptly (“Æsthetics,” Berlin, 1837, vol. ii., p. 186): “The sorrows of love, these frustrate hopes, the very state of being in love, the never-ending pains which the lover actually experiences, this never-ending happiness and joy to which he looks forward in imagination—these are matters devoid of all general interest; they concern only the lover himself.” Schleiermacher also insists, in his letters concerning “Lucinde,” on the great importance of love for the spiritual development of the individual.

The individualization of love has certainly resulted in a great decline in the predominance of the reproductive idea, of the subjective sense of race, without it ever being possible for it to lose its eminent objective significance. Nietzsche, therefore, declares a “reproductive impulse” to be pure “mythology;”[38] and Carpenter, also, in his book, “Love’s Coming of Age,” says that human love is mainly a desire for complete union, and only in much less degree a wish for the reproduction of the race. The profound significance of individual love in the promotion of civilization is exceedingly well described by him when he says:

“Taking union as the main point, we may look upon the idealized sex-love as a sense of contact pervading the whole mind and body—while the sex-organs are a specialization of this faculty of union in the outermost sphere: union in the bodily sphere giving rise to bodily generation, the same as union in the mental and emotional spheres occasions generation of another kind.”

Proof of the fact that love, in its purely individual relations, is also of great importance for human civilization, that it is profoundly significant for the higher evolution of humanity, in addition to its importance for the perpetuation of the species—the proof of this thesis is very important in view of certain problems connected with the theory of population and in view of the practical conclusions deduced from that theory, as, for example, the doctrine of neo-malthusianism. Love and love’s embrace do not exist only for the purposes of the species: they are also of importance to the ego; they are necessary for the life, the evolution, and the internal growth of the individual himself.

And we must not fail to recognize to what extent the fact that the individual has gained much from love ultimately reacts also to the advantage of the species. For the species, as well as for the individual, the true path of progress lies in the direction of the individualization of the sexual impulses.

When we study in detail the gradual permeation of sexuality with spiritual elements, the gradual development of love, and its advance towards perfection by means of civilization, we ascertain that for the love of the modern civilized man there exists a kind of biogenetic, or rather psychogenetic, fundamental law. In modern love we encounter all the spiritual elements which were actively operative in the love of past times; the love of the civilized man of the present day is an extracted, shortened, compressed repetition of the entire developmental course of love from the earliest times to the present day. And the general course of this development reappears also in the love of the individual.

This course is, to put the matter shortly, from the general to the individual, from the remote to the proximate. We can further divide the history of human love into two great epochs. In the first epoch, love was, above all, a transcendental relationship of a religio-metaphysical nature. The transcendental relationships played a more important part than the purely human and personal. Everywhere an ulterior element played its part. In the second epoch, love underwent an evolution into a more personal relationship, in which the human being himself took foremost place, as compared with any transcendental considerations. The history of love is, in fact, an illustration of Compte’s replacement of the theologico-metaphysical epoch of mental development by the anthropological. In individual love, however, there still remain active and demonstrable many transcendental elements. The oldest spiritual elements of love continue to form a portion of the content of modern love, and to play a more or less dominant part in its genesis.

To this primeval and psychical phenomenon belongs, above all, an intimate association between religious ideas and feelings and the sexual life. In a certain sense, the history of religion can be regarded as the history of a peculiar mode of manifestation of the human sexual impulse, especially in its influence on the imagination and its products.

Certain modern writers, members of the laity far from learned in the history of civilization, have considered the Roman Catholic Church pre-eminently responsible for the appearance of this sexual element in ritual and dogma. This, however, is grossly unjust. A scientific study of these relations teaches us that all religions exhibit to a greater or less degree this sexual admixture, and if this appears more prominent in the Roman Catholic Church, it is due, in the first place, to the fact that this religion is nearer to us in time than many of the religions of antiquity, and, in the second place, it is explicable on the ground that the Roman Catholic Church has always displayed greater openness and less hypocrisy than, for example, the Protestant pietists, who, as the Königsberg scandal, the Eva van Buttler affair, etc., show, are no less blameworthy in respect of sexual vagaries.

A really objective basis for an opinion regarding the relations between religion and sexuality can only be obtained when we cease to consider these relations as an affair of dogma and of the confessional, and study them upon the basis to which they properly belong—to wit, the anthropological. For these relationships are peculiar to the genus homo as such. The sexual element is quite as prominent in the religions of primitive peoples as in those of modern civilized nations.

Anthropological science has hitherto been occupied more with the fact than with the explanation of the remarkable relations between religion and sexuality. There can, however, be no doubt that these relations arise out of the very nature of mankind. The various anthropologists and physicians who have occupied themselves with these problems are in agreement upon this point: that the connexion between religion and the sexual life can be explained only on anthropomorphic-animistic grounds—that is, by the same kind of ideas which Tylor has proved to be the foundation of the primitive mental life.

Thus, the great physician and anthropologist Theodor Billroth doubts the existence of any pure religious perception entirely free from all sensual elements. In a letter to Hanslick, dated February 21, 1891, he writes:

“In my opinion, it is nonsensical to speak of a special religious perception. What we call by this name is either a purely fanciful and imaginative opinion, which may rise to the intensity of hallucination, and has for substratum any kind of imaginative product which excites a yearning in the believing or loving individual—or else, in fanatics, it is an actual erotic excitement, like the rhythmical prayer-movements of the Mohammedans, the dancing of the Dervishes, or the jumping of the Flagellants. The Church as bridegroom for the nun, as bride for the monk, has a similar signification. It is, in a certain sense, the continuation of the service of Isis, and of the festivals of Aphrodite and Bacchus. Man has always created his gods or his god in his own image, and prays and sings to him—that is, properly speaking, to himself—in the artistic forms of the period. Since the so-called divine is always a mere abstraction or personification of one or several human attributes in the highest conceivable potency, it follows that human and divine, worldly and religious, cannot really be of differing natures. Man cannot, in fact, think anything supernatural, nor can he do anything unnatural, because he never can think or act except with human attributes.”

This explanation coincides with the view of Ludwig Feuerbach, who has especially insisted on the anthropomorphistic element in religio-sexual phenomena in his essay “Concerning Mariolatry.”

M’Lennan and Tylor were among the chief discoverers of the animistic aspect of religio-sexual ideas. In a way analogous to his attitude towards other phenomena, primitive man assumed the activity of spirits in explanation of the sexual impulse and everything associated therewith; and he paid divine worship to the sexual impulse, as the visible and palpable manifestation of those spirits.

I myself have more fully described this physiological process in a somewhat different manner (“Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia Sexualis,” vol. i., pp. 76, 77), and I quote here my account of the primitive deification of the sexual.

As something elemental, incredible, supernatural, the sexual impulse made its appearance in man’s life at the time of puberty; by its overwhelming force, by the intensity, spontaneity, and multiplicity, of the perceptions to which it gave rise, it awakened feelings which enriched, vivified, and inflamed the imagination in an unexpected manner. This phenomenon, overwhelming him with elemental force, filled primitive man with a holy fear. He ascribed it to a supernatural influence, and this supernatural influence became associated in his circle of perceptions with those others which he had previously experienced, and which had aroused in him the feeling of dependence upon one or several higher powers, before which he knelt in worship. To what an extent the metaphysical invaded the whole sexual life of man, Schopenhauer has clearly shown in his “Metaphysic of Sexual Love.” Religion and sexuality come into the most intimate association in this perception of the metaphysical and in this feeling of dependence; hence arise the remarkable relations between the two, and that easy transition of religious feelings into sexual feelings which is manifest in all the relations of life. In both cases the surrender, the renunciation, of the individual personality is experienced as a pleasurable sensation. Schopenhauer has described in a classical manner the metaphysical impulsive force of love striving onward towards the infinite and the divine, whose analogy with the religious impulse we cannot fail to recognize.

In his thoughtful book, “The Vital Laws of Civilization” (Halle, 1904, p. 52), Eduard von Mayer has also discussed the religio-sexual problem. He starts from the idea that man regarded as higher than himself that which he was unable to master, and, above all, hunger and love.

“The pains of ungratified hunger or love plough deep furrows, into which falls the seed of voluptuousness, of satisfied hunger, or of the joys of love. And to primitive man, to whom the entire universe is full of living beings, hunger and love also appear as divine powers, which pain and plague him until their will is satisfied.”

The association of sexuality with religion affects both sexes equally, although the phenomenon appears more intense in woman, and is more enduring in her, owing to the greater depth of her emotional life. The brothers de Goncourt, in their diary, describe religion as simply a portion of woman’s sexual life. Feminine sexual activity thus appears something religious, pious, holy. And those priests who pretended to “sanctify” by their love the women whom they seduced, were certainly more accurate, from the physiological point of view, than the Church was in its condemnation of carnal lust as sin and the work of the devil. In the middle ages it was a view commonly held in France that women who had intercourse with priests were in some sort sanctified thereby. The mistresses of priests were called the “consecrated.”

The identity of religious and sexual perceptions explains the frequent transformation of one into the other, and the continuous association between the two. A sexual emotion will often function vicariously for a religious emotion, in part or wholly.

The unusually interesting history of the complicated and remarkable religio-sexual phenomena renders clear to us individual processes of this kind and certain peculiarities of racial psychology; and thereby we are led to understand the powerful after-effects of these phenomena in the customs, the morals, and the conventions of our time, and we are enlightened as to the rôle still played by the religio-sexual factor in the life of many men even of our own day.

One of the oldest, if not the oldest, of religio-sexual phenomena is religious prostitution—the “lust-sacrifice,” as Eduard von Mayer happily expresses it—since therein the sexual act is regarded as a sacrifice made to the deity. We have here the unrestricted offering by a woman of her body to every chance comer without love, as an act of simple sensuality, and for payment, and thus we find all the characteristics of what at the present day we term “prostitution.”

According to the researches I have myself previously published regarding religious prostitution, this may be divided into two great groups:

1. A single act of prostitution in honour of the deity.

2. Permanent religious prostitution.

A single act of religious prostitution mostly consists in the offering of virginity; sometimes also in the single, not repeated, offering of an already deflowered woman. In the single act of religious prostitution, the woman either offers herself directly to the deity, the bodily act of defloration being effected by a divine physical symbol—as, for instance, by a penis made of stone, ivory, or wood—or by direct intercourse with the statue of the god; or else the woman gives herself to a human representative of the deity—for instance, to the king, to a priest, to a blood-relative (not seldom to her own father, this being a variety of religious incest), and sometimes to a passing stranger.[39]

With regard to the first mode of defloration, by means of a divine symbol, we have especially full reports from the East Indies. Here, in the sixteenth century, in the Southern Deccan, the Portuguese Duarte Barbosa first saw the religious defloration of girls effected by means of the “lingam,” the divine phallus. Girls aged ten years only were sacrificed to the deity in this brutal manner. From a later time come the accounts of Jan Huygen van Linschoten and Gasparo Balbi, regarding the customs of the inhabitants of Goa. The bride was taken into the temple, where a penis of iron or ivory was thrust into the vagina, so that the hymen was destroyed. In other cases, the girl’s genitals were brought into contact with the stone penis of an image of the god, at a shrine eighteen miles distant from Goa. W. Schultze, in his “East Indian Journey” (Amsterdam, 1676, p. 161a), relates:

“By means of this priapus, with the assistance of friends and relatives, the maiden was deprived of her virginity with force and in a painful manner; at the same time the bridegroom rejoiced that the foul and accursed idol had done him this honour, in the hope that as a result of this sacrifice he would enjoy greater happiness in his marriage.”

This process of defloration of Indian virgins by the lingam idol is confirmed by the reports of John Fryer, Roe, Jeon Moquet, Abbé Guyon, Démeunier, and others.

The god Baal Peor, worshipped by the Moabites and Jews, seems also to have possessed such a divine power of defloration. His name, “Peor,” “to open,” is supposed to relate to the destruction of the hymen.[40]

This relationship is more distinctly expressed in the names of certain gods of the ancient Romans, such as Dea Perfica, Dea Pertunda, Mutunus Tutunus, regarding whose functions in connexion with defloration, shown unquestionably by the etymology of their names, I have referred to at greater length in my essay on “Ancient Roman Medicine” (published in Puschmann’s “Handbook of the History of Medicine,” p. 407; Jena, 1902).

For the honour of the sexual divinities, the bride was compelled, as Augustine, Lactantius, and Arnobius report, to seat herself upon the “fascinum”—that is, the membrum virile of the priapus statue—and in this way, either physically, or at least symbolically, sacrifice her virginity to the deity. According to the legend, the conception of Ocrisia was actually effected in this way![41]

According to the second method by which single acts of religious prostitution are effected, a representative of the deity exercises the latter’s right of defloration. It is a form of religious jus primæ noctis, which is given to the king, the priest, the father, and, above all, to a casual stranger, before the girl becomes the property of her husband or master. In cases in which the husband has effected defloration, the deity may be satisfied by the woman later giving herself once to his representative.

The best-known form of religious prostitution is the Mylittacult of the Babylonians, the worship of that goddess who, according to Bachofen, represents the uncontrolled life of Nature in its fullest creative activity, unchecked by any man-made laws—the goddess whose free nature is opposed to the constraining bonds of marriage. For this reason the goddess, as representative of the unrestrained nature principle, demands from every girl a free gift of herself to any man wishing to have intercourse with her. This demand is made in the name of Mylitta and in the temple devoted to her. The money paid by the man in return for his sexual indulgence belongs to the goddess, and is added to the treasures of the temple.[42]

Herodotus and Strabo give us additional accounts of this remarkable service of Mylitta. Women of rank, as well as those of the lower classes, must allow themselves to be possessed once by a stranger, and were not permitted to return home until they had given their tribute to the goddess. Moreover, the woman might not refuse herself to any stranger, whilst the man, on the other hand, had a free choice. Thus in this account we find all the characteristics of “prostitution” according to our present ideas.

This custom was abolished by the Emperor Constantine, as Eusebius informs us, in his biography of this Emperor. The accounts of Strabo and of Quintus Curtius show us that it had persisted from the time of Herodotus to the time of Constantine; in Cyprus, Phœnicia, Carthage, Judea, Armenia, and Lokris, the Mylittacult was diffused.[43]

The true origin of this cult was a consecration to the deity, a tribute to the goddess of voluptuousness. Secondarily only, other elements may have entered into the practice, as, for instance, the later widely diffused assumption of the uncleanness and poisonous properties of the blood which was shed in the act of defloration. At the same time the religious idea of a “sacrifice” may have become associated with the idea of “self-surrender” to an utterly strange and unloved man, so that it is possible that at the root of this peculiar custom there lay a kind of masochism on the part of the woman, whilst we cannot fail to recognize the existence of a sadistic basis in the demeanour of the betrothed man or husband, surrendering the woman to a strange man; both of these elements—sadism and masochism—having here a religious signification.

In Eastern Asia, and among many savage races, priests played the part of representatives of the deity to whom the defloration of the girls and the newly-married was assigned; for instance, in the Indian sect of the “Mahārājas,” founded by Vallabha, in which “immorality was elevated to the level of a divine law.”[44]

These “great kings” assumed the part of deities who had an unlimited right of possession over the wives of the faithful—above all, the right of defloration. They proclaimed as the most perfect mode of honouring the god a complete surrender of the woman to the spiritual chief of the sect, for purposes of carnal lust—in exact imitation of the shepherdesses (“gopis”), the mistresses of the god Krishna. This took place during the pastoral games “rasmandali” in the autumn.[45] In addition, on account of his activity as deflorator, the priest received a present in the name of the deity. Abel Rémusat reports in his “Nouveaux Mélanges Asiatiques” (Paris, 1824, vol. i., p. 16 et seq.), following the account of a Chinese author of the thirteenth century, the peculiar methods employed in Cambodia for the purpose of religious defloration. Here the priests of Buddha or the priests of the Tao religion were carried in sedan-chairs to the girls awaiting them. Each girl had a candle with a mark on it. The “tshin-than” (= adjustment of posture—that is, sexual intercourse) must be finished before the candle had burnt down to this mark!

The medicine-men and wizards among the Caribs of Central and South America, the “piaches” or “pajes,” had to effect the defloration of the young girls;[46] whilst among other primitive peoples this right was assigned to the chiefs.[47]

The talented and far-seeing Bachofen, one of the greatest of our investigators into the history and psychology of civilization, in his classical works upon “Matriarchy” and upon “The Legend of Tanaquil,” has very cleverly pointed out that religious prostitution in general arises from the primitive opposition to the individualization of love, instinctively felt by primitive peoples. In fact, in the religious view of sexual matters more value is placed upon the act than the person, the individual. Hence arises the slight esteem—so strongly opposed to our modern view—felt for physical and moral virginity in woman, which to us (whether rightly or not we will not now discuss) appears the symbol of feminine individuality. Waitz, Bachofen, Kulischer, Post, Ploss-Bartels, Rottmann, and other ethnologists, give additional accounts of the contempt, to us so remarkable, felt in primitive states for the virgin woman. The tragi-comic position of our own “old maids” is closely connected with this primeval sentiment.[48]

The facts we have just given regarding single acts of religious prostitution will pave the way for the understanding of permanent temple prostitution as a historical phenomenon.

Sexual self-surrender as a purely sensual act is associated with religious feeling. Thus in some cases a woman would experience a combination of ardent sensuality with intense religious feeling, would devote herself wholly to the service of the god, and in his name would permanently surrender her body; whilst in other cases the idea of a divine harem—in Indian belief every god has a harem—would find its earthly exemplar in temple prostitution, by means of which the deity would enjoy a number of women through the intermediation of men; or, finally, this custom would arise out of the primitive practice, according to which sexual intercourse, regarded as a religious act, customarily took place in a temple, or in some consecrated room of a house. In support of this view, we may quote a significant utterance from Herodotus (chapter lxiv. of the second book of his “History”), who in ethnological matters had such accurate discrimination. He reports that among the Egyptians intercourse was strictly forbidden in the temples, and then says:

“For people of all nations, except the Egyptians and the Hellenes, are accustomed to copulate in holy places, and proceed after intercourse unwashed into the holy places; and they are of opinion that men resemble animals, and every one sees beasts and birds copulating in the temples of the gods, and in the consecrated groves. Now, if this were displeasing to the gods, the animals would not do it. Men, therefore, do this, and give this reason for it.”

This custom arose, without doubt, from the need for a religious sentiment, and from the wish to enter into direct communion with the deity, by remaining in the temple during the sexual act. When later the divine beings obtained their own consecrated women in the form of the temple-girls, it was no longer necessary for a man to take his own wife or some other woman into the temple, for now communion with the deity could be obtained by means of intercourse with the temple-girls. In the case of feminine deities a fourth cause or influence comes into operation in the production of temple prostitution, inasmuch as the courtesans, on account of their extreme beauty and their remarkable intellectual powers, were often regarded as representatives of the goddess. This explains how it happened that among the Greeks beautiful hetairae served as models for Praxiteles and Apelles, when these sculptors were making statues for the temple.

The sacred priests of Venus, the “kade-girls” of the Phœnicians, and the “hierodules” of the Greeks, were the servants of Aphrodite, and dwelt within the precincts of the temple. Their number was often very great. Thus in Corinth more than 1,000 female hierodules prostituted themselves in the precincts of the temple of Aphrodite Porne, and even within the temple.[49]

India, where the primitive phenomena of the amatory life can best be studied, is also the favourite seat of temple prostitution, since the religious view of the sexual life is nowhere so prominent as in the Indian beliefs.[50] The temple girls of India are known as “nautch-girls,” or “nautch-women.” Warneck writes regarding them:

“Every Hindu temple of any importance possesses an arsenal of nautch-girls—that is, dancing-girls—who, next to the sacrificial priests, are the most highly respected among the personnel of the temple. It is not long since these temple-girls (just like the hetairae of Ancient Greece) were among the only educated women in India. These priestesses, betrothed to the gods from early childhood, were under the professional obligation to prostitute themselves to every one without distinction of caste. This self-surrender is so far from being regarded as a disgrace that even the most highly placed families regarded it as an honour to devote their daughters to the service of the temple. In the Madras Presidency alone there are about 12,000 of these temple prostitutes.”[51]

Shortt gives further interesting details of these temple prostitutes, who are also known as “thassee.”

Religious prostitution is to a certain extent still practised in Southern Borneo; and in a newspaper published at Amsterdam—The German Weekly News of the Netherlands—the following account of the practice appears in the issue of July 30, 1907:

“In the Dyak country there are to be found in nearly every kampong (village) individuals known as ‘balians’ and ‘basirs.’ The balians are prostitutes who also perform medical services. The basirs are men who dress in women’s clothing, and in other respects perform the same functions as the balians, but not all the basirs act in this way. Balians and basirs are also commonly employed to perform certain religious ceremonies, on festal occasions, at marriages, funerals, births, etc. According to the nature of the festivity, five to fifteen of them officiate. The president of the balians and basirs goes by the name of the ‘upu’; usually the oldest and most experienced is chosen for this office. The upu sits in the middle, with the others to right and left. At an important festival the upu receives from twenty to thirty gulden; the others one to fifteen gulden. The further away that a balian sits from the upu, the smaller is her honorarium; the honorarium is called ‘laluh.’ The principal balians and basirs are known as ‘bawimait maninjan sangjang’—that is, ‘holy women.’ At the present time the basirs no longer exercise the immoral portions of their duties, because the Government inflicts severe penalties if they do so; moreover, they are not allowed now to appear in public in women’s clothing.”

Religion shares with the sexual impulse the unceasing yearning, the sentiment of everlastingness, the mystic absorption into the depths of life, the longing for the coalescence of individualities in an eternally blessed union, free from earthly fetters. Hence the longing for death felt by lovers and by mystically enraptured pietists, which has been so wonderfully described by Leopardi. “The yearning for death felt by lovers is identical with the yearning for sexual union,” aptly remarks H. Swoboda, and he very rightly points out that many a suicide ascribed to “unfortunate love” is rather the result of a happy love.

Among primitive peoples, and in ancient times, religio-erotic festivals first gave an opportunity for the manifestation of this religio-sexual mysticism. In this the transition of religious ecstasy into sexual perceptions is very clearly visible, and in the sexual orgies in which these religious frenzies often found an appropriate finale we see the crudest expression of the relationship between religion and sexuality. In such cases sexual ardour appears to be equivalent to a prolongation and an increase of the religious ardour—fundamentally, radically coincident, as the natural earthly discharge of an ecstatic tension directed to the sphere of the remote and the metaphysical.

The fact that such sexual excesses are throughout the world found in association with religion, that since the very earliest times they have been connected with the most various forms of religion, proves once more that the origin of this relationship is dependent on the very nature of religion as such, and that it is not in any way due to the individual historic character of any one belief. It is, moreover, quite uncritical and altogether without justification for any modern writer to endeavour to make Roman Catholicism responsible for such an association; Roman Catholicism as such has as little to do with the matter as all other beliefs. Religio-sexual phenomena belong to the everywhere recurring elementary ideas of the human race (elementary ideas in the sense of Bastian); and the only way of regarding such phenomena that can be considered scientifically sound, is from the anthropological and ethnological standpoint.

This sexual religious mysticism meets us everywhere—in the religious festivals of antiquity, the festivals of Isis in Egypt, and the festivals of imperial Rome, both alike accompanied by the wildest sexual orgies; in the festivals of Baal Peor, among the Jews, in the Venus and Adonis festivals of the Phœnicians, in Cyprus and Byblos, in the Aphrodisian, the Dionysian, and the Eleusinian festivals of the Hellenes; in the festival of Flora in Rome, in which prostitutes ran about naked; in the Roman Bacchanalia; and in the festival of the bona dea, the wild sexual licence of which is only too clearly presented to our eyes in the celebrated account of Juvenal.

In India, the sect of Caitanya, founded in the sixteenth century, celebrated the maddest religio-sexual orgies. Their ritual consisted principally of long litanies and hymns, stuffed full with unbridled eroticism, and followed by wild dances, all leading up to the sexual culmination, in which “the love of God” (bhakti) was to be made as clearly perceptible as possible.[52] Even worse were the Sakta sects (the name is derived from sakti, force—that is, the sensuous manifestation of the god Siva). They gave themselves up with ardent sensuality to the service of the female emanations of Siva, all distinctions of caste being ignored, and wild sensual promiscuity prevailing. Divine service always preceded the act of sexual intercourse.

Among the Kauchiluas, one of these Sakta sects, each of the women who took part in these divine services threw a small ornament into a box kept by the priests. After the termination of the religious festival, each male member of the congregation took one of these articles out of the box, whereupon the possessor of the article must give herself to him in the subsequent unbridled sexual excesses, even if the two should happen to be brother and sister.[53]

Ancient Central and South America were also familiar with wild outbreaks of a sexual-religious character. In Guatemala, on the days of the great sacrifices, there occurred sexual orgies of the worst kind, men having intercourse promiscuously with mothers, sisters, daughters, children, and concubines; and at the “Akhataymita festivals” of the ancient Peruvians, the religious observances terminated in a race between completely nude men and women, in which each man overtaking a woman immediately had sexual intercourse with her.[54]

Sexual mysticism found its way also into Christianity. When the renowned theologian Usener, in his work “Mythology,” writes in relation to these matters, “the whole of paganism found its way into Christianity,” we must point out that in our view what “corrupted” Christianity was not “paganism,” but the fundamental phenomena of primitive human nature, the primordial connexion between religion and sexuality, which by a natural necessity manifested itself in Christianity not less than in other religions.

Thus down to the present day we encounter the most peculiar manifestations of sexual mysticism in the most diverse Christian sects, and not merely in Roman Catholicism.

In the fourth century of our era, the Jewish-Christian sect of the Sarabaïtes concluded their religious festivals with wild sexual orgies, which are graphically described by Cassianus. This sect persisted into the ninth century. The later history of the Christian sects is full of this religio-sexual element. Religious and sexual ardour take one another’s place, pass one into the other, mutually increase one another. I need merely allude to certain points familiar in the history of civilization, and investigated and described by many recent students: the religio-erotic orgiastic festivals of the Nicolaitans, the Adamites, the Valesians, the Carpocratians, the Epiphanians, the Cainites, and the Manichæans. Dixon, in his “Spiritual Wives” (2 vols., London, 1868), has described the sexual excesses of recent Protestant sects, such as the “Mucker” of Königsberg, the “Erweckten” (“the awakened”), the Foxian spiritualists of Hydesville, etc. Widely known also is the peculiar association between sexuality and religion in Mormonism, polygamy being among the Mormons a religious ordinance.

Not only do Roman Catholicism and Protestantism exhibit such phenomena, but in the Greek Church also sexual mysticism gives rise to the most remarkable offshoots. Leroy-Beaulieu gives an account of the Russian sect of the “Skakuny,” or “Jumpers,” who at their nocturnal assemblies throw themselves into a state of erotic religious ecstasy by hopping and jumping, like the dancing Dervishes of Islam. When the frenzy reaches a climax, a shameless, utterly promiscuous union of the sexes occurs, of which incest is a common feature.[55]

Quite apart from these sectarian peculiarities, religio-sexual perceptions play a definite part in the ideas of present-day, truly pious Christians. The idea of a “unio mystica” between man and the Deity manifests itself everywhere.[56]

Albrecht Dieterich, in his learned work, “A Mithraist Liturgy,” contributes valuable material to the history of civilization concerning these mystical unions. The oldest heathen cults were familiar with the idea of love unions as a representation of the union of man with God; and in the New Testament the ideas of the bridegroom and the marriage feast play a leading part. Christ is the “bridegroom” of the Church, the Church is His “bride.” Pious maidens and nuns are happy to call themselves the brides of Christ. This ecstatic union has always as its substratum a sexual imagination. Augustine says: “Like a bridegroom Christ leaves His bridal chamber; in the mood of a bridegroom He bestrides the field of the world.”

The literature, the theology, the visions, and the plastic art of the middle ages abound in embellishments of the mystical marriage. St. Catherine of Siena and St. Theresa were favourite objects of this form of art. The baroque artist Bernini, in his representation of St. Theresa, in the Church Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome, has painted a truly modern “alcove scene,” so that a mocking Frenchman, President de Brosses, said, speaking of this picture, “Ah, if that is divine love, I know all about it.”

On October 8, 1900, when Crescentia Höss, of Kaufbeuren, was canonized in the Peterskirche, a picture was exhibited in which was depicted the mystical union between the new saint and the Redeemer. To the picture was attached a Latin inscription signifying, “Our Lord Jesus Christ presents to the virgin Crescentia, in the presence of the most holy Mother of God and of Crescentia’s guardian angel as groomsman, the marriage ring, and weds her.” The novice about to become a nun appears before the altar dressed as a bride, in order to wed herself eternally to Christ; and in the life of the common people we find an even more realistic view is taken of this mystical marriage. A celibate priesthood appears to the peasant, notwithstanding all the respect that he has for the clerical vocation, as something strange and incomprehensible; he regards the “primiz,” the first mass of the newly ordained priest, as a marriage which the most reverend priest celebrates with the Church, and for this purpose the Church is represented by a young girl. This is at the present day still a popular custom in Baden, Bavaria, and the Tyrol. In this ceremony, which does not lack a poetic aspect—it is admirably described by F. P. Piger in the Zeitschrift des Vereins für Volkskunde, 1899—the peasants who are present make the coarsest and most pointed jokes, and as soon as the celebration is finished, they withdraw, in the company of the “holy” bride, to a public-house, where “they need not be embarrassed by the presence of the reverend priest.”

The intimate association between sexuality and religion in these mystical unions and marriages has been shown by Ludwig Feuerbach in his treatise, “Ueber den Marienkultus” (“On Mariolatry”), Complete Works, Leipzig, 1846, vol. i., pp. 181-199. A very interesting instance of this is also afforded by the following religious poem, which appears in a poetical devotional work, at one time very widely diffused among the feminine population of France (“Les Perles de Saint François de Sales, ou les plus belles Pensées du Bienheureux sur l’Amour de Dieu,” Paris, 1871):

“Vive Jésus, vive sa force,
Vive son agréable amorce!
Vive Jésus, quand sa bonté
Me reduit dans la nudité;
Vive Jésus, quand il m’appelle:
Ma sœur, ma colombe, ma belle!

Vive Jésus en tous mes pas,
Vivent ses amoureux appas!
Vive Jésus, lorsque sa bouche
D’un baiser amoureux me touche!

Vive Jésus quand ses blandices
Me comblent de chastes délices!
Vive Jésus lorsque à mon aise
Il me permet que je la baise!”

[“Praise to Jesus, praise His power,
Praise His sweet allurements!
Praise to Jesus, when His goodness
Reduces me to nakedness;
Praise to Jesus when He says to me:
‘My sister, My dove, My beautiful one!’

“Praise to Jesus in all my steps,
Praise to His amorous charms!
Praise to Jesus, when His mouth
Touches mine in a loving kiss!

“Praise to Jesus when His gentle caresses
Overwhelm me with chaste joys!
Praise to Jesus when at my leisure
He allows me to kiss Him!”]

In addition to religious prostitution and to sexual mysticism, two other religious manifestations show an intimate relationship with the sexual life, are, indeed, in part of sexual origin—namely, asceticism and the belief in witchcraft.

Neither of these is, as has often been maintained by superficial writers, peculiar to the Christian faith. As Nietzsche says, Eros did not poison Christianity alone; asceticism and the belief in witchcraft are common anthropological conceptions, met with throughout the history of civilization, and arising from the primitive ardour of religious perceptions.

To what degree is the high estimation of asceticism—that is, the view that earthly and eternal salvation are to be found in complete sexual abstinence—associated with the religious sentiment? Religion is the yearning after an ideal, a belief in a process of perfectibility. To such a belief the sexual impulse and everything connected with it must appear as the greatest possible hindrance to the realization of the ideal, because nowhere else is the disharmony of existence so plainly manifest as in the sexual life.

In the fifth chapter of his work on “The Nature of Man,” Metchnikoff has collected all the numerous disharmonies of the reproductive organs and the reproductive functions, in consequence of which the modern man, become self-conscious, suffers so severely. Among these disharmonious phenomena in social life, Metchnikoff enumerates, inter alia, the troublesome, painful, and unæsthetic menstrual hæmorrhage in women, which all primitive peoples regarded as something unclean and evil; the pains of childbirth; the asynchronism between puberty and the general maturity of the organism, the latter occurring much later than the former, and thus giving rise to temporal inequalities of development in different parts of the sexual functions, causing, for example, masturbation actually before the development of spermatozoa; the long interval that commonly elapses between the onset of sexual maturity and the conclusion of marriage; the numerous disharmonious phenomena occurring in connexion with the decline of reproductive activity at a later stage of life, when marked specific excitability and sexual sensibility often persist after the capacity for sexual intercourse has been lost; and finally the disharmonies in sexual intercourse between man and woman.

According to Metchnikoff, this disharmony of the sexual life, from the earliest to the most advanced age, is the source of so many evils, that almost all religions have harshly judged and severely condemned the sexual functions, and have recommended abstinence from coitus as the best means for the harmonious and ideal regulation of life.

In addition to this, we have to take into consideration the opposition between spirit and matter, deeply realized already by primitive man. The sexual, as the most intense and most sensuous expression of material existence, was opposed to the spiritual, and was regarded as an unclean element, which must be fought, overcome, and, when possible, utterly uprooted, in favour of the spiritual life. In one of the most ancient of mythologies the first recorded instance of the gratification of sexual desire resulted in excluding man for ever from “Paradise”—in excluding him, that is to say, from the highest kind of spiritual existence. The principal psychological characteristic of asceticism is therefore to be found, not only in the vow of poverty, but, in addition, and even more, is it found in sexual abstinence, in the battle against the “flesh” (“caro,” to the fathers of the early Church, always denoted the genital organs).

What is, however, the inevitable consequence of this continual battle with the sexual impulse? Weininger expressed the opinion (“Sex and Character,” p. 469, second edition; Vienna, 1904): “The renunciation of sexuality kills only the physical man, and kills him only in order, for the first time, to ensure the complete existence of the spiritual man”; but this is entirely false, and proceeds from an extremely deficient knowledge of human nature. For the “renunciation of sexuality” is, in truth, the most unsuitable way of securing a complete existence for the spiritual man. Just as little will it annihilate the physical man. For he who wishes to overcome and cast out the sexual impulse (powerful in every normal man, and at times overwhelming in its strength) must keep the subject constantly before his eyes, for ever in his thoughts. Thus it came to pass that the ascetic was actually more occupied with the subject of the sexual impulse than is the case with the normal man. This was favoured all the more by the ascetic’s voluntary flight from the world, by his continuous life in solitude—a life favourable to the production of hallucinations and visions, and one which becomes tolerable only by a sort of natural reaction in the form of a luxuriance of imaginative sensuality. For

“Nous naissons, nous vivons pour la société:
A nous-mêmes livrés dans une solitude,
Notre bonheur bientôt fait notre inquiétude.”

(Boileau, Satire X.)

[“We are born, we live for society:
Given up to ourselves in solitude,
Our happiness is speedily replaced by restlessness.”]

This “inquiétude,” this intensification of the nervous life in all relations, was especially noticeable in the sexual sphere. Visions of a sexual character, erotic temptations, mortifications of the flesh in the form of self-flagellation, self-emasculation and mutilations of the genital organs, are characteristic ascetic phenomena. On the other hand, the excessive valuation and glorification of the pure spiritual led not only to the view that matter was something in its nature sinful and base, but also led directly to sexual excesses, for many ascetic sects declared that what happened to the already sinful body was a matter of indifference, that every contamination of the body was permissible. Hence is to be explained the remarkable fact of the occurrence of natural and unnatural unchastity in numerous ascetic sects.

Sexual mortification and sexual excesses—these are the two poles between which the life of the ascetic oscillates, so that we see in each case a marked sexual intermixture. Asceticism is, therefore, often merely the means by which sexual enjoyment is obtained in another form and in a more intense degree.

Asceticism is as old as human religion, and as widely diffused throughout the entire world. We find individual ascetics among many savage peoples; ascetic sects, especially among the ancient and modern civilized races, in Babylon, Syria, Phrygia, Judæa, even in pre-Columbian Mexico, and most developed in India, in Islam, and in Christianity.

The Indian samkhya-doctrine, demanding increased self-discipline, “yoga,” which was based upon the opposition between spirit and matter, led to the adoption of asceticism in Buddhism and in the religion of the Jains, also to the foundation of ascetic sects, such as the “Acelakas,” the “Ajivakas,” the “Suthrēs” or “Pure,” who, according to Hardy, “are in their life a disgrace to their name.” Yogahood attained its highest development among Sivaitic sects of the ninth to the sixteenth centuries; these alternated between uncontrolled satisfaction of the rudest sexual impulses and asceticism pushed to the point of self-torture.

In Islam it was the sect of the Sufi in which the relation between sexuality and asceticism was especially manifest; but before this Christianity had developed asceticism into a formal system, and had deduced its most extreme consequences. To the early Christians, only the nutritive impulse appeared natural; the sexual impulse was debased nature; physical and psychical emasculation were actually recommended in the New Testament writings (cf. Matt. xix. 12). Already in the second century of the Christian era numerous Christians voluntarily castrated themselves, and in the fourth century the Council of Nicæa found it necessary to deal with the prevalence of this ascetic abuse, and with the predecessors of the modern “skopzen.”[57]

Numerous ascetics and saints withdrew into solitude in order to attain salvation by castigation of the body. But it is very noteworthy that they almost all lived and moved exclusively in the sexual, and that, in the way already explained, they came to occupy themselves incessantly with all the problems of the sexual life.

The writings of the saints are full of such references to the vita sexualis, and are, therefore, a valuable source for the history of ancient morals. Nothing was so interesting to these ascetics as the life of prostitutes and the sexual excesses of the impious. Numerous legends relate the attempts of the saints to induce prostitutes to abandon their profession, and to turn to a holy life, and the work of Charles de Bussy, “Les Courtisanes Saintes,” shows the result of these labours. St. Vitalius visited the brothels every night, to give the women money in order that they might not sin, and prayed for their conversion.

Thus, in the case of the ascetics, whose thoughts were continually occupied with sexual matters, the sole result of their castigation, self-torture, and emasculation, was to lead their sexual life ever wider astray into morbid and perverse paths. The monstrous sexual visions of the saints reflect in a typical manner the incredible violence of the sexual perceptions of the ascetics. To use the words of Augustine, how far were these unhappy beings from the “serene clearness of love,” how near were they to the “obscurity of sensual lust!” These visions, these “false pictures,” allured the “sleepers” to something to which, indeed, in the awakening state they could not have been misled (Augustine, “Confessions,” x. 30). The forms of beautiful naked women (with whom, moreover, the ascetics often really lay in bed in order to test their powers) appeared to them in dreams. Fetichistic and symbolic vision of an erotic nature pestered them, and led to the most violent sensual temptations, until in the sects of the Valesians, the Marcionites, and the Gnostics they resulted in sexual excesses. Marcion, the founder of the well-known sect named after him, preached continence, but maintained that sexual excesses could not hinder salvation, since it was only the soul that rose again after death! The Gnostics oscillated between unconditional celibacy and indiscriminate sexual indulgence. As late as the nineteenth century an ascetic mystic led the Protestant sect of Königsberg pietists into the grossest sensual excesses.

From asceticism arose monasticism and the cloistral life, to which the considerations above given fully apply. The undeniable unchastity of the medieval cloisters, which found its most characteristic expression in denoting brothels by the name of “abbeys,” and, above all, in popular songs and in folk-tales, also shows us very clearly the relations between religious asceticism and the vita sexualis.

The idea of asceticism has not lost its primitive force even at the present day, and retains it for certain men not under the influence of the Church. But the character and origin of this modern asceticism are different. We understand it when we remind ourselves of the saying of Otto Weininger, this typical adherent of “modern” asceticism, that the man who has the worst opinion of woman is not the one who has least to do with them, but rather the one who has had the greatest number of bonnes fortunes (“Sex and Character,” p. 315).

The ascetics of early Christianity first denied sexuality—for example, by self-castration, or by flight into solitude—in order subsequently to affirm it the more strongly. Our modern fin-de-siècle ascetics, above all, the three most successful literary apostles of asceticism—Schopenhauer, Tolstoi, and Weininger—at first affirmed their sexuality most intensely, in order subsequently to deny it in the most fundamental manner. They studied voluptuousness, not merely in the ideal, but also in reality. For this reason, also, they have furnished us with more valuable conclusions regarding its nature and its significance in the life of individual men than we can obtain from the visions of the early Christian ascetics. This is true above all of Schopenhauer and Tolstoi.

Schopenhauer had first to endure in his own person the whole tragedy of voluptuousness, to experience the elemental force of the sexual impulse, the “enmity” of love (see his own account given to Challemel-Lacour), before he proceeded to grasp the full significance of the ascetic idea. His asceticism is intimately associated with his sensuality, and with the consequences of its activity. I believe that I have myself recently furnished a striking proof of this fact by the publication of a hitherto unknown holograph manuscript of the philosopher,[58] by which it is clearly established that he had suffered from syphilitic infection. In this connexion we find the explanation of the close relationship which Schopenhauer himself postulated between the “wonderful venereal disease” and asceticism. From his own utterances regarding syphilis, and, above all, from the fact that he himself had suffered from the disease, we are able to grasp the significance that syphilis had in the conception of his ascetic views, which were developed under the immediate influence of his experiences, sorrows, and passions; whereas in old age, when the elemental force of the sexual impulse, and the unhappy consequence of yielding to it, no longer troubled him, there appeared in his thought a distinctly happier colouring.

Tolstoi also recognizes without reserve how much he had been affected by voluptuousness. “I know,” he says, “how lust hides everything, how it annihilates everything, by which the heart and the reason are nourished.” Lack of continence on the part of men is, in his view, the cause of the stupidity of life. Tolstoi’s conception of asceticism is, however, by no means identical with the early Christian, the Buddhistic, and the Schopenhauerian asceticism. In the beautiful saying, “Only with woman can one lose purity, only with her can one preserve it,” lies the admission that absolute chastity is an unattainable ideal, and that man can reach only a relative asceticism. We should hold fast to this utterance in Tolstoi’s teaching, which is in no way systematically developed, and should ignore his insane doctrine of the unchastity of married life. Later, during our discussion of the so-called “problem of continence,” we shall return to this idea of a relative continence, and of the good that lies therein.

Weininger, whose views are unquestionably strongly pathological, recurs wholly to the ideas of early Christian asceticism. According to him, “coitus in every case contradicts the idea of humanity”! Sexuality debases man, reproduction and fertility are “nauseating.”[59] Man is not free, only because he has originated in an immoral manner! In woman he denies again and again the idea of humanity. The renunciation, the conquest of femininity, it is this that he demands. Since all femininity is immorality, woman must cease to be woman, and must become man![60]

Georg Hirth has described Weininger’s book as “an unparalleled crime against humanity.”[61] Since, however, Probst, in his psychiatric study of Weininger, has brought forward evidence to show that in Weininger’s book we have to do with the work of a lunatic, the author of this crime cannot at any rate be held responsible. It is only to be regretted that so many readers have been led astray by the presence of isolated thoughtful passages in the book to take Weininger in earnest as a “thinker,” and even in company with the bizarre August Strindberg to believe that Weininger has solved “the most difficult of all problems”!

Very significant and influential even down to the present day are the relations between religion and sexual sentiments exhibited in the belief in witchcraft.[62] This belief, extending backwards to the most remote age, is the principal source of all misogyny and contempt for women—of which fact we cannot too often remind our modern misogynists, in order to make clear to them the utter stupidity, the primitiveness, and the atavistic character of their views.

Here, again, we must first show the falsity of the view that the belief in witches is a specifically Christian experience. To the diffusion of this error the celebrated work of J. Michelet, “La Sorcière,” has especially contributed, for in this book the witch is represented as a Christian medieval discovery. But the Christian religion, as such, is as little blameworthy for this belief as are all the other confessions of faith. The belief in witches, with its religio-sexual basis, is a primitive general anthropological phenomenon, a fixture, a part of primitive human history arising from the primeval relations between religious magic and the sexual life.

“When we look deeply into the province of psychology,” says G. H. von Schubert, “we not only suspect, but recognize with great certainty, that there exists a secret combination between the activities of the animal carnal sexual impulse and the receptivity of human nature for magical manifestations.

“We stand here in the depths of the abyss in which the lust of the flesh becomes inflamed to the lust of hell, and in which the flesh, with all its indwelling forces of sin and death, celebrated its greatest triumph over the spirit appointed by God to command the flesh.”[63]

The animism of primitive man, and of savage man at the present day, sees in all frightful natural phenomena shaking his innermost being to its foundation the manifestation and action of demons and sorcerers. The rutting impulse also, which attracts primitive man to woman, appears to him to be due to the influence of a demon, and soon woman herself came to seem to man something uncanny, something magical. Thus, in its origin the belief in witchcraft arises from the sexual impulse, and throughout its history sorcery in all its forms remained associated with the sexual impulse.

This sexual origin of the belief in witches and in magic has been carefully described by the celebrated ethnologist K. Fr. Ph. von Martius, on the basis of his observations amongst the indigens of Central Brazil. “All sorcery arises from rutting,” said an old Indian to him.

Magic propagates itself by means of sexual desire, and, according to Martius, will predominate among primitive peoples as long as these remain unchaste.[64] Secret arts, voluptuousness, and unnatural vice are inseparable one from another. This is proved by the entire history of human civilization and morals. Among the indigens of Brazil, the “pajé” or “piache,” the sorcerer or medicine-man, plays the same part as the medieval or Christian witch.

Sorcerers and witches are, above all, experienced in the sexual province; popular belief always turns first to this subject. The witches of ancient Rome resemble those of the middle ages in respect of their evil practices in sexual relations. According to J. Frank, the word “hexe” (witch) is derived from “hagat”—that is, “vagabond woman.” The ascetic view of the middle ages, formulated principally by men, saw in woman one who seduced man to sensual, sinful lust, the personification of the Evil One, the “janua diaboli,” and, ultimately, a female demon and a witch, whose very being is an impersonation of the obscene and the sexual. The doctrines of Original Sin and of the Immaculate Conception had unquestionably an important share in this conception of woman.

The idea of woman as a witch turned almost exclusively on the sexual, and the witch was for the most part represented as a “mistress of the devil” (cf. W. G. Soldan, “History of Witch-Trials,” pp. 147-159; Stuttgart, 1843), in which sexual perversion plays the principal part, since, instead of simple sexual intercourse, the most horrible unnatural vice was assumed to occur.

Holzinger, in his valuable lecture on the “Natural History of Witches,” characterized the spiritual and moral condition of the time, which brought forth such an idea, in a few apt words:

“Whilst in the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries, as those well acquainted with the state of morals during this period can all confirm, a most unbounded freedom was dominant in sexual relations, the State and the Church were desirous of compelling the people to keep better order by the use of actual force, and by religious compulsion. So forced a transformation in so vital a matter necessarily resulted in a reaction of the worst kind, and forced into secret channels the impulse which it had attempted to suppress. This reaction occurred, moreover, with an elemental force. There resulted widespread sexual violence and seduction, hesitating at nothing, often insanely daring, in which everywhere the devil was supposed to help; every one’s head was turned in this way, the uncontrolled lust of debauchees found vent in secret bacchanalian associations and orgies, wherein many, with or without masquerade, played the part of Satan; shameful deeds were perpetrated by excited women and by procuresses and prostitutes ready for any kind of immoral abomination; add to these sexual orgies the most widely diffused web of a completely developed theory of witchcraft, and the systematic strengthening by the clergy of the widely prevalent belief in the devil—all these things woven in a labyrinthine connexion, made it possible for thousands upon thousands to be murdered by a disordered justice and to be sacrificed to delusion.”

The study of the witch-trials of the middle ages and of recent times—for it is well known that in the seventies of the nineteenth century (!) such trials still occurred[65]—would without doubt afford valuable contributions to the doctrine of psychopathia sexualis, and at the same time would throw a remarkable light upon the origin of sexual aberrations.

What a large amount of sexual abnormality arises even to-day from this common, human, obscure, superstitious impulse dependent upon the intermixture of religious mysticism and sexual desire, and which in the medieval belief in witches attained such astonishing development!

As Michelet proved in his great work on “Sorcery,” it was the religious imagination straying into sexual by-paths, which for the most part animated the belief in witchcraft, and thus led to the most horrible aberrations, principally of a sadistic nature.

Like superstition, so also the sexual-religious obsession of the middle ages, still persists in many persons, even at the present day, and gives rise to sexual anomalies.

Apart from asceticism and the belief in witchcraft, theological literature offers numerous instances of the relationship between religion and sexuality.

In an essay published six years ago,[66] I showed the important part which sexual questions have played in the so-called pastoral medicine—that is to say, in those theological writings in which the individual facts and problems of medicine are studied from the theological standpoint, and their relation to dogma is determined. We find here theological casuistry carried to its extreme limits, in relation to all possible problems of the vita sexualis. The experiences of the confessional are employed in a remarkable manner, the religious imagination wandering, in a peculiar combination of scholasticism and sensuality, in the obscure fields of human aberration.

The ostensible inducement to the theological consideration of sexual problems is in part offered by the statements of perverse individuals in the confessional, and in part by public scandals. In both cases casuistry endeavours, from the religious standpoint, to formulate certain normal rules for the judgment of the various matters relating to the sexual life. This would, however, have been impossible, had there not existed an intimate connexion between sexuality and religion.

Only in this way is it possible to explain the origin of the gigantic literature of sexual casuistry in theology, and especially in pastoral medicine. A comprehension of these facts has led certain writers to launch bitter invectives against the system of which the confessional formed so essential a part. This is a narrow and prejudiced view, which we mention only to condemn. There is, however, ample justification for the representations of physicians and anthropologists, who are able to observe matters in the great connexion sketched above, and who have recognized the relations between religion and the sexual life to be something common to all humanity, not the artificial products of any particular spiritual tendency. It is precisely the frequent endeavours of the Catholic Church to overcome the worst outgrowths in this direction, which teach us, notwithstanding their failure to eradicate sexual aberrations, that these relationships depend upon the very nature of religion.

There is not a single sexual problem which has not been discussed in the most subtle manner by the theological casuists,[67] so that their writings offer us a most instructive picture of imaginative activity in the sexual sphere.

The most detailed discussion, verging on the salacious, of the degree to which sexual contact is permissible, gave rise to the name “theologiens mammillaires,” because some of them—Benzi, for example, and Rousselot—sanctioned “tatti mammillari” (mammillary palpation). This doctrine was condemned by Pope Benedict XIV., which proves that the Catholic Church as such has not invariably sanctioned these things.

In the “Golden Key” (“Llave de Oro”) of Antonio Maria Claret, the Archbishop of Cuba, in Debreyne’s “Moechialogie,” in the writings on moral theology of Liguori, Dens, and J. C. Saettler, in the “Diaconales,” widely diffused in France, and in many similar works, all possible sexual problems which have come before the confessional, or possibly might come there, have been thoroughly discussed—even the most improbable and impossible. Coitus interruptus, irrigatio vaginæ post coitum, pollutions (nocturnal seminal emissions), bestiality, necrophilia, figuræ Veneris (positions in which coitus is effected), procuration, various kinds of caresses, conjugal onanism, abortion, varieties of masturbation, pæderasty, intercourse with a statue (!), psychical onanism, pædication, etc.—all have been subjected to a subtle critical theological analysis. In a sense, these writings are really valuable mines for the study of psychopathia sexualis. Later we shall have frequently to touch on the religious etiology of the individual sexual aberrations.

From the preceding discussion it appears quite clearly that the relations between religion and the vita sexualis are to be regarded as general anthropological phenomena, and not as peculiarities arising by chance, the accidental results of beliefs, time, or race. The modern physician, jurist, and criminal anthropologist must therefore pay the most careful attention to the religious factor in the normal and abnormal sexual life of mankind, if he wishes to arrive at an unprejudiced and undisturbed knowledge of sexual anomalies. Havelock Ellis has also laid stress on the leading significance of religious sexual perceptions. He proved that small oscillations of erotic feelings accompany all religious perceptions, and that in some circumstances the erotic feelings overwhelm the religious perceptions.[68] We still meet with sexual excesses under the cloak of religion, as occurred recently (1905) in Holland, and (1901) in England. In the English instance young girls were initiated into the most horrible forms of unchastity in the religious association founded by the American Horos and his wife, and known by the name of “Theocratic Unity.”[69]

Friedrich Schlegel, as Rudolf von Gottschall remarks, proclaimed in his “Lucinde” the new evangel of the future, in which voluptuousness—as during the time of Astarte—is to form a part of religious ritual. The reawakened tendency of our own day towards romantic modes of perception would certainly seem to involve the danger of a renewal and strengthening of religio-sexual ideas.

For as long as the feelings of love carry with them an inexpressible, overwhelming force, like that of religious perceptions, the intimate association between religion and sexuality will persist both in a good and a bad sense. An elderly physician, who in his interesting book detailed the experiences derived from forty years of practice,[70] made very apposite remarks regarding this religious sexualism. According to him, unbounded piety is “often no more than a sexual symptom,” proceeding from deprivation of love or satiety of love, the latter reminding us of the saying “Young whore, old devotee.” Moreover, this is true alike of man and woman. Piety dependent upon deprivation of love can often be cured by “castor, cold douches, or a well-arranged marriage with a robust, energetic man,” who drives away for ever the “heavenly bridegroom.”[71]

The religious perception is a completely general yearning, and the same is the case with the associated sexual feelings. The boundless everlasting impulsion which both contain does not admit of any individualization. For this reason, the religio-sexual perceptions can play only a subordinate part in the individual love of the future; they constitute only the first step in the history of the idealization of the sexual impulse, and of its spiritualization to form love.

In the romance “Scipio Cicala,” by Rehfues, the Neapolitan abbess calls out “I love love,” after she has gone through the enumeration of all the phases of passionate love towards God. The modern man, however, says to the woman, and the woman says to the man, “I love you”; the general religious love has capitulated to the individual love.

This is clearly the direction taken by “the way of the spirit” in love, which we shall now pursue further.

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[33] Cf. F. von Andrian, “Some Results of Modern Ethnology,” in “Correspondenzblatt der deutschen Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie, und Urgeschichte” (1894, No. 8, p. 71).

[34] “Love,” in the sense above defined, is peculiar to mankind, and for this reason we must, as Ploss-Bartels also insists, admit its existence in human beings at the very lowest levels of civilization. There it is, indeed, no more than “a faintly glimmering, easily extinguished spark,” while among civilized peoples it has become “a bright, widely diffused flame.”

[35] Regarding the connexion between sexuality and spiritual activity, see also Virey, “Recherches médico-philosophiques sur la Nature et les Facultés de l’Homme” (Paris, 1817, p. 39).

[36] For the apt and convenient word poietic, in preference to creative or productive, I have to thank Mr. H. G. Wells. See his most admirable “A Modern Utopia,” and on p. 265 et seq. his brilliant classification of “four main classes of mind—the Poietic, the Kinetic, the Dull, and the Base.”... “The Poietic or creative class of mental individuality embraces a wide range of types,” but, he goes on to say, the two principal varieties of the poietic type are those classified as artistic and scientific natures respectively. It is the quality by which these two natures are distinguished from the kinetic and the dull to which Mr. Wells gives the name of “poietic,” and it is precisely this quality whose interconnexion with the sexual life is insisted on in the text by Dr. Bloch and by the authors from whom he quotes.—Translator.

[37] Cf. W. Griesinger, “Mental Disorders,” third edition (Brunswick, 1871, p. 7).

[38] Rudolf Topp speaks of a “degeneration” of the “healthy natural reproductive impulse” into the “sexual impulse.” In the primeval period of human history, he maintains, man knew and gratified the reproductive impulse only; the sexual impulse developed gradually, and in a later stage of the evolutionary history of mankind, out of the reproductive impulse, and, in fact, is a degeneration (!) of the latter. In this period we may look for the first beginnings of functional impotence, on account of the too frequent exercise of the sexual function. Cf. R. Topp, “On the Therapeutic Use of Yohimbin ‘Riedel’ as an Aphrodisiac, with Especial Reference to Functional Impotence in the Male,” published in the Allgemeine Medizinische Central-Zeitung, 1906, No. 10.

[39] From this fact we may draw the conclusion that the so-called hospitable prostitution is only a variety of religious prostitution.

[40] J. A. Dulaure, “Des Divinités génératrices,” etc. (Paris, 1885).

[41] W. Schwartz, “Prehistoric Anthropological Studies,” p. 278 (Berlin, 1884).

[42] Cf. J. J. Bachofen, “The Legend of Tanaquil, an Investigation concerning Orientalism in Rome and Italy,” p. 43 (Heidelberg, 1870).

[43] Cf. the details and more exact reports in my work, “Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia Sexualis,” vol. i., pp. 84, 85.

[44] Karsandas Mulji, “History of the Sect of Mahārājas or Vallabhāchārjas in Western India,” p. 161 (London, 1865).

[45] Cf. E. Hardy, “History of Indian Religions,” pp. 124-126 (Leipzig, 1898).

[46] K. Fr. Ph. von Martius, “Contributions to the Ethnography and Philology of America,” vol. i., p. 113 (Leipzig, 1867).

[47] Starke, “The Primitive Family,” p. 135 (Leipzig, 1888).

[48] Cf. L. Tobler, “Old Maids in Belief and Custom among the German People” (Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie), by Lazarus and Steinthal, vol. xiv., pp. 64-90 (Berlin, 1882).

[49] W. H. Roscher, “Nectar and Ambrosia,” pp. 80-89 (Leipzig, 1883).

[50] Cf. Edward Sellon, “Annotations on the Sacred Writings of the Hindus,” p. 3 (London, 1865).

[51] Ploss-Bartels, “Das Weib in der Natur- und Völkerkunde,” vol. i., p. 580 (eighth edition, Leipzig, 1905).

[52] E. Hardy, op. cit., p. 125.

[53] Sellon, “Annotations,” etc., p. 30.

[54] Ploss-Bartels, op. cit., p. 608.

[55] Cf. H. Beck, “Count Tolstoi’s ‘Kreuzer Sonata,’” etc., p. 5 (Leipzig, 1898).

[56] Cf. “Mystical Marriages,” in the Vossische Zeitung, No. 370, August 9, 1904.

[57] Cf. Adolf Harnack, “Medical Data from Ancient Ecclesiastical History” (Leipzig, 1892, pp. 27, 28, and 52).

[58] Iwan Bloch, “Schopenhauer’s Illness in the Year 1823” (A Contribution to Pathography based upon an Unpublished Document). Paper read at the Berlin Society for the History of the Natural Sciences and Medicine on June 15, 1906. Printed in Medizinische Klinik, 1906, Nos. 25 and 26.

[59] It is a remarkable fact that the hypersexual Marquis de Sade expressed this identical idea, in precise agreement with the asexual Weininger.

[60] Cf. the chapter “Woman and Humanity,” in “Sex and Character,” pp. 453-472.

[61] G. Hirth, “Ways to Love,” p. 219. Cf. also the pertinent remark of Grete Meisel-Hess, “Misogyny and Contempt for Women” (Vienna, 1904).

[62] Cf. also the exhaustive research, with regard to witch-mania and witchcraft, by Count von Hoensbroech, “The Papacy in its Socio-Civil Reality” (third edition, vol. i., pp. 380-599; Leipzig).

[63] Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert, “The Sins of Sorcery in their Old and New Form” (Erlangen, 1854, p. 25).

[64] Cf. K. Fr. von Martius, “The Nature, the Diseases, the Doctors, and the Therapeutic Methods of the Primitive Inhabitants of Brazil” (Munich, 1843, pp. 111-113).

[65] According to Holzinger, on August 20, 1877, at St. Jacobo in Mexico, five witches were burnt alive! Then “hundreds of angry pens were set in motion to declaim the horrible anachronism.” As late as 1875, Friedrich Nippold, in a work published by Holtzendorff and Oncken—“Problems of the Day in Germany”—gives an account of the continued belief in witches at the present day.

[66] Iwan Bloch, “Regarding the Idea of a History of Civilization in Relation to Medicine,” published in Die Medizinische Woche, 1900, No. 36.

[67] The best-known of these are Augustine, Benzi, Bouvier, Cangiamila, Capellmann, Claret, Debreyne, Dens, Filliucius, Gury, Liguori, Moja, Molinos, Moullet, Pereira, Rodriguez, Rousselot, Sa, Thomas Sanchez, Samuel Schroeer, Skiers, Soto, Suarez, Tamburini, Thomas Aquinas, Vivaldi, Wigandt, Zenardi. Copious extracts from their writings are given by Count von Hoensbroech in the second volume of his work—“The Papacy in its Socio-Civil Reality” (Leipzig, 1907).

[68] Havelock Ellis, “The Sexual Impulse and the Sentiment of Shame.”

[69] We shall return later to the religio-sexual “Masses,” celebrated even at the present day in Paris and other large towns.

[70] “Personal Experiences, or Forty Years from the life of a Well-known Physician” (Leipzig, 1854, three vols.). In addition, “Gleanings In and Out of Myself,” from the papers of the author of the “Personal Experiences,” etc. (Leipzig, 1856, four vols.).

[71] “Gleanings In and Out of Myself,” vol. ii., pp. 37-45. Regarding the relations between religion and sexuality, many interesting details are found in the work of George Keben, “The Half-Christians and the Whole Devil: the Road to Hell of Superstition” (Gross-Lichterfelde, 1905), especially in the chapter “The Brothel,” pp. 93-110.

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CHAPTER VII
THE WAY OF THE SPIRIT IN LOVE—THE EROTIC SENSE OF SHAME (NAKEDNESS AND CLOTHING)

“Shame has made no change in man as regards his bodily outlines, but shame has played a very important part in the entire province of clothing, and it has acquired such spiritual power that the entire amatory life of the higher human beings is dominated by it. It is, in the first place, in consequence of this sense of shame that man’s amatory life has ultimately and individually separated from that of other animals.”—Wilhelm Bölsche.

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