PSYCHOLOGICAL RELATIONS OF LOVE TO RELIGION
Love and eroticism play a great part in religion, and many derivatives of religious sentiment are intimately associated with the sexual appetite. As Krafft-Ebing says, religious ecstasy is closely related to amorous ecstasy, and very often appears in the guise of consolation and compensation for an unhappy or disappointed love, or even in the absence of sexual love. In the insane, religion and eroticism are combined in a very characteristic manner. Among a number of peoples certain cruel religious customs are the result of transformed erotic conceptions.
As in religion, there is something mystical in love; the ineffable dream of eternal ecstasy. This is why the two kinds of mystic and erotic exaltation become blended in religions.
Krafft-Ebing attributes the cruelty found in many religions to sadism (sexual lust excited by the sufferings of others). (Vide Chap. VIII.)
"The relationship so often established between religion, lust and cruelty can be reduced almost to the following formula: at the acme of their development, the religious and sexual passions show a concordance in quality and in quantity of excitation, and may consequently replace each other, under certain circumstances. Under special pathological influences, both may be transformed into cruelty."—(Krafft-Ebing.)
We shall return to this subject in Chapters VIII and XII.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] This tendency of man has been analyzed with a very refined psychology by Labiche, in one of his most celebrated comedies: "Le voyage de M. Perichon."