“According to Genesis, unnatural vice was the sin of a people who were not the Lord’s people, and the Levitical legislation represents Canaanitish abominations as the chief reason why the Canaanites were exterminated. Now we know that sodomy entered as an element in their religion. Besides kedēshōth, or female prostitutes, there were kedēshīm or male prostitutes, attached to their temples. The word kādēsh, translated ‘Sodomite,’ properly denotes a man dedicated to a deity; and it appears that such men were consecrated to the mother of the gods, the famous Dea Syria, whose priests or devotees they were considered to be. The male devotees of this and other goddesses were probably in a position analogous to that occupied by the female devotees of certain gods, who also, as we have seen, have developed into libertines; and the sodomitic acts committed with these temple prostitutes may, like the connections with priestesses, have had in view to transfer blessings to the worshippers. In Morocco supernatural benefits are expected not only from heterosexual, but also from homosexual intercourse with a holy person. The kedēshīm are frequently alluded to in the Old Testament, especially in the period of the monarchy, when rites of foreign origin made their way into both Israel and Judah. And it is natural that the Yāhveh worshipper should regard their practices with the utmost horror as forming part of an idolatrous cult.
“The Hebrew conception of homosexual love to some extent affected Muhammadanism, and passed into Christianity. The notion that it is a form of sacrilege was here strengthened by the habits of the Gentiles. St. Paul found the abominations of Sodom prevalent among nations who had ‘changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the creator.’ During the Middle Ages heretics were accused of unnatural vice as a matter of course. Indeed, so closely was sodomy associated with heresy that the same name was applied to both. In La Coutume de Touraine-Anjou the word hérite, which is the ancient form of hérétique, seems to be used in the sense of ‘sodomite’; and the French bougre (from the Latin Bulgarus, Bulgarian), as also its English synonym, was originally a name given to a sect of heretics who came from Bulgaria in the eleventh century and was afterwards applied to other heretics, but at the same time it became the regular expression for a person guilty of unnatural intercourse. In mediaeval laws sodomy was also repeatedly mentioned together with heresy, and the punishment was the same for both. It thus remained a religious offence of the first order. It was not only a ‘vitium nefandum et super omnia detestandum,’ but it was one of the four ‘clamantia peccata,’ or crying sins, a ‘crime de Majestie, vers le Roy celestre.’ Very naturally, therefore, it has come to be regarded with somewhat greater leniency by law and public opinion in proportion as they have emancipated themselves from theological doctrines. And the fresh light which the scientific study of the sexual impulse has lately thrown upon the subject of homosexuality must also necessarily influence the moral ideas relating to it, in so far as no scrutinising judge can fail to take into account the pressure which a powerful non-volitional desire exercises upon an agent’s will.”
[1] Partly based on a paper by Munshi Kanhaya Lāl of the Gazetteer Office.
[2] Muhammadans of Gujarāt, by Khān Bahādur Fazalullah Lutfullah Faridi, pp. 21, 22.
[3] Rāsmāla, ii. p. 90.
[4] Faridi, ibidem.
[5] See article on Bhāt.
[6] Acacia arabica.
[7] The late Mr. A. M. T. Jackson’s notes, Ind. Ant., August 1912, p. 56.