154 ([return])
[ The kindly and generous deed of one Moslem to another, and by no means rare in real life.]
155 ([return])
[ "Eunuch," etymologically meaning chamberlain ({eynè échein}), a bed-chamber-servant or slave, was presently confined to castrated men found useful for special purposes, like gelded horses, hounds, and cockerels turned to capons. Some writers hold that the creation of the semivir or apocopus began as a punishment in Egypt and elsewhere; and so under the Romans amputation of the "peccant part" was frequent: others trace the Greek "invalid," i.e., impotent man, to marital jealousy, and not a few to the wife who wished to use the sexless for hard work in the house without danger to the slave-girls. The origin of the mutilation is referred by Ammianus Marcellinus (lib. iv. chap. 17), and the Classics generally, to Semiramis, an "ancient queen" of decidedly doubtful epoch, who thus prevented the propagation of weaklings. But in Genesis (xxxvii. 36; xxxix. 1, margin) we find Potiphar termed a "Sarím" (castrato), an "attenuating circumstance" for Mrs. P. Herodotus (iii. chap. 48) tells us that Periander, tyrant of Corinth, sent three hundred Corcyrean boys to Alyattes for castration {epì êt ektomê}, and that Panionios of Chios sold caponised lads for high prices (viii. 105): he notices (viii. 104 and other places) that eunuchs "of the Sun, of Heaven, of the hand of God," were looked upon as honourable men amongst the Persians whom Stephanus and Brissonius charge with having invented the name (Dabistan i. 171). Ctesias also declares that the Persian kings were under the influence of eunuchs. In the debauched ages of Rome the women found a new use for these effeminates, who had lost only the testes or testiculi=the witnesses (of generative force): it is noticed by Juvenal (i. 22; ii. 365-379; vi. 366)
—sunt quos imbelles et mollia semper
Oscula delectant.
So Martial,
—vult futui Gallia, non parere,
And Mirabeau knew (see Kadísah) "qu'ils mordent les femmes et les liment avec une précieuse continuité." (Compare my vol. ii. 90; v. 46.) The men also used them as catamites (Horace i. Od. xxxvii.).
"Contaminato cum grege turpium,
Morbo virorum."
In religion the intestabilis or intestatus was held ill-omened, and not permitted to become a priest (Seneca Controv. ii. 4), a practice perpetuated in the various Christian churches. The manufacture was forbidden, to the satisfaction of Martial, by Domitian, whose edict Nero confirmed; and was restored by the Byzantine empire, which advanced eunuchs, like Eutropius and Narses, to the highest dignities of the realm. The cruel custom to the eternal disgrace of mediæval Christianity was revived in Rome for providing the choirs in the Sistine Chapel and elsewhere with boys' voices. Isaiah mentions the custom (lvi. 3-6). Mohammed, who notices in the Koran (xxiv. 31), "such men as attend women and have no need of women," i.e. "have no natural force," expressly forbade (iv. 118), "changing Allah's creatures," referring, say the commentators, to superstitious ear-cropping of cattle, tattooing, teeth-sharpening, sodomy, tribadism, and slave-gelding. See also the "Hidáyah," vol. iv. 121; and the famous divine Al-Siyúti, the last of his school, wrote a tractate Fi 'l-Tahrími Khidmati 'l-Khisyán=on the illegality of using eunuchs. Yet the Harem perpetuated the practice throughout AI-Islam and African jealousy made a gross abuse of it. To quote no other instance, the Sultan of Dár-For had a thousand eunuchs under a Malik or king, and all the chief offices of the empire, such as Ab (father) and Báb (door), were monopolised by these neutrals. The centre of supply was the Upper Nile, where the operation was found dangerous after the age of fifteen, and when badly performed only one in four survived. For this reason, during the last century the Coptic monks of Girgah and Zawy al-Dayr, near Assiout, engaged in this scandalous traffic, and declared that it was philanthropic to operate scientifically (Prof. Panuri and many others). Eunuchs are now made in the Sudán, Nubia, Abyssinia, Kordofán, and Dár-For, especially the Messalmiyah district: one of those towns was called "Tawáshah" (eunuchry) from the traffic there conducted by Fukahá or religious teachers. Many are supplied by the district between Majarah (Majarash?) and the port Masawwah; there are also depôts at Mbadr, near Tajurrah-harbour, where Yusuf Bey, Governor in 1880, caponised some forty boys, including the brother of a hostile African chief: here also the well-known Abu Bakr was scandalously active. It is calculated that not less than eight thousand of these unfortunates are annually exported to Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey. Article IV. of the AngIo-Egyptian Convention punishes the offense with death, and no one would object to hanging the murderer under whose mutilating razor a boy dies. Yet this, like most of our modern "improvements" in Egypt, is a mere brutum fulmen. The crime is committed under our very eyes, but we will not see it.