A man, thirty-eight years of age, of bad reputation, one night found his way into a byre in order to gratify his sexual desires by intercourse with a cow. First he introduced his penis into the vagina of a heifer nine months old; then he tried the same thing on a cow, which threw him off, and he fell to the ground. In a rage at this, he seized a pitchfork and forcibly thrust one of the prongs, first into the anus of the heifer, and then into that of the cow. The cow died speedily, whilst the heifer had to be slaughtered next day. In the cow, in addition to a laceration of the rectum about 11⁄2 inches in length, there was found laceration of the capsules of the right and left kidneys, perforation of the mesentery, of the colon, of the liver, and of the diaphragm, also a laceration 11⁄2 inches long and equally deep in the right lung. These extensive injuries showed that the pitchfork must have been thrust in repeatedly. The appearances in the body of the slaughtered heifer were similar to those found in the cow. The accused was condemned to imprisonment for two years and three months, part of this term being for the offence against morality and part for the injury to property.
The following extremely rare case of bestiality on the part of a woman was seen by Krauss (op. cit., p. 281):
“If I can venture to credit the reports I have so frequently heard (and it is difficult to believe that they are pure inventions), among the Southern Slavs intercourse between women and horses or asses is comparatively common. How they go to work in this matter I do not know from personal observation. I did, however, once see a Chrowot woman of ideal beauty, who stood at night completely naked in front of a lighted lamp, and in this position had intercourse with a tom cat. She experienced so intense an orgasm that she did not notice me, although I watched the scene barely two paces from the window.”
The part played by lap-dogs in the case of many ladies has been previously mentioned.
Formerly the question was quite seriously discussed, whether a human being could be seduced or violated by an animal, and Hufeland relates a fantastic story of copulation between a dog and a sleeping little girl, which I have criticized in another work;[653] but there are, as a matter of fact, no proofs of such an occurrence, or of its possibility. In brothels, certainly, dogs are from time to time trained to have intercourse with prostitutes.[654]
Much rarer than acts of fornication with animals are similar acts with corpses, the so-called “necrophilia.” In the works of de Sade, we find references to the algolagnistic factor of this rare sexual aberration, to the sadistic or masochistic element in necrophilia, inasmuch as in the case of the dead individual we have to do with a completely helpless and defenceless being, who is totally unable to resist the act; sadism is also manifested in the not uncommon mutilation of the corpses;[655] and the sadistic impulse further obtains gratification from the idea of decomposition, from the smell, the cold, and the horror. In the case of necrophilia opportunity also plays a part. Soldiers and monks who are occupied in watching the dead, and who chance to be seized with sexual excitement, have gratified themselves with female corpses.
Sexual acts with corpses are, indeed, not so rare as was formerly assumed, but they belong to the class of sexual aberrations regarding which we have but few authentic observations, most of these derived from French authors. Remarkable is the following recent case, which occurred in April, 1901:[656]
The following hardly credible case of necrophilia is reported from Schonau: In the cemetery of that place Frau Maschke, thirty years of age, was buried in the morning, but the grave was not completely filled in. In the evening an inhabitant visited the grave of a relative, which was close to that of Frau Maschke, and she noticed with alarm that the top of the coffin in which the corpse of Frau Maschke was lying was moving up and down. The discoverer of this alarming occurrence hastened to the sexton, and reported the fact. The sexton hurried to the cemetery with several workmen, and there, to their horror, they surprised an inmate of the poorhouse named Wokatsch as he was in the act of violating the woman’s corpse. The bestial criminal was at once arrested. Soon afterwards a judicial investigation took place, for which purpose the corpse was removed from the grave and taken to the mortuary in order to determine how far the criminal had actually proceeded in his attempt on the body.
In folk-lore, mythology, and belles-lettres, necrophilia plays a large part, a matter to which I have referred at greater length in another work (“Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia Sexualis,” vol. ii., pp. 288-296). The idea of intercourse with a dead body, and also that of intercourse with an insensible human being, somewhat frequently gives rise to peculiar forms of sexual aberration. First of all in this connexion we have to consider symbolic necrophilia, in which the person concerned contents himself with the simple appearance of death. A prostitute or some other woman must clothe herself in a shroud, lie in a coffin, or on the “bed of death,” or in a room draped as a “chamber of death,” and during the whole time must pretend to be dead, whilst the necrophilist satisfies himself sexually by various acts. Cases of such a nature are reported by de Sade, Neri, Taxil, Tarnowsky, etc.
Closely allied to these necrophilist tendencies is the remarkable “Venus statuaria,” the love for and sexual intercourse with statues and other representations of the human person. Here also, apart from certain aesthetic motives,[657] which may predominate in the case of statues of exceptional artistic perfection, we have to do, for the most part, with the same motives that give rise to necrophilia—sadistic, masochistic, and fetichistic. In the case of individuals who are sexually extremely excitable, a walk through a museum containing many statues may suffice to give rise to libido. Of this we have examples. Generally, however, we have to do with immature, youthful, and, above all, uncultured individuals, who are devoid of all æsthetic sensibility, and have grown up also in a state of prudery and horror of the nude. It is of similar persons that the Catholic moral theologian Bouvier speaks, when, in his “Manuel des Confesseurs” (Verviers, 1876), he discusses the case of masturbation before a statue of the Holy Virgin. We have previously given examples of the fact that direct sexual intercourse with a statue occurs as part of a religious fetichism and phallus cult ([p. 101]). In such cases the statue is taken for the divinity, but in a profane statue-love it is taken for the living human being, as in the celebrated case of the gardener who attempted coitus with the statue of the Venus of Milo. The idea of the life of the statue is even more distinctly manifest in the so-called “pygmalionism,” an imitation of the ancient legend of Pygmalion and Galatea, and a utilization of this legend for erotic ends. Naked living women, in such cases, stand as “statues” upon suitable pedestals, and are watched by the pygmalionist, whereupon they gradually come to life. The whole scene induces sexual enjoyment in the pygmalionist, who is generally an old, outworn debauchee. Canler has described such practices as going on in Parisian brothels, on one occasion three prostitutes appearing respectively as the goddesses Venus, Minerva, and Juno.[658]