Religion and Lust

CHAPTER III.

THE PSYCHICAL CORRELATION OF RELIGIOUS EMOTION AND SEXUAL DESIRE

That there exists a relationship between the cultivated ethical emotion, religious feeling, and the essentially natural physio-psychical function, sexual desire or libido, is a fact noticed and commented on by many thinkers and writers. The literature of the subject is, however, exceedingly fragmentary and disconnected, no author (as far as I have been able to determine) having devoted as much as one thousand words to the consideration of this very interesting psychical phenomenon. Hence, my data have been gathered from many sources, which are as diversified as they are numerous.

Beyond a question of doubt, man becomes religiously enthused most frequently either early in life, when pubescence is, or is about to be, established, or late in life, when sexual desire has become either entirely extinct or very much abated. Young boys and girls are exceedingly impressionable at, or just before, puberty, and are apt to embrace religion with the utmost enthusiasm. A distinguished evangelist declares that “men and women seldom or never enter into the kingdom of God after they have arrived at maturity. Out of a thousand converts, seven hundred are converted before they are twenty years old.”122

The Roman Catholic church is keenly alive to these facts, therefore requires the rite of confirmation to be administered, if possible, to its would-be communicants at, or before, the age of puberty.123

Of all the insanities of the pubescent state, erotomania and religious mania are the most frequent and the most pronounced. Sometimes they go hand in hand, the most inordinate sensuality being coupled with abnormal religious zeal. A young woman of my acquaintance, whose conduct has given rise to much scandal, is, at times, a reincarnate Messalina, while at other times she is the very embodiment of ethical and religious purity. Another young girl, in whom vita sexualis was about to be established, became religiously insane and had delusions in which she declared that she was in heaven and sitting at the right hand of God. She declared this over and over again, while shamelessly committing manustrupation! Krafft-Ebing calls attention to this relation between religious and sexual feeling in psycho-pathological states. “It suffices,” says he, “to recall how intense sensuality makes itself manifest in the clinical history of many religious maniacs; the motley mixture of religious and sexual delusions that is so frequently observed in psychoses (e. g., in maniacal women who think they are or will be the mother of God), but particularly in masturbatic insanity; and finally, the sexual, cruel self-punishment, injuries, self-castrations, and even self-crucifixions, resulting from abnormal religio-sexual feeling.”124

An example of the last mentioned self-immolation (self-crucifixion) is given by Berghierri, and is a remarkable instance of the interchangeableness of religious emotion and sexual desire in psychopathic individuals. The man in question, who had been intensely sensual, manufactured a cross, nailed himself to it, and ingeniously managed to suspend himself and cross from the window of his sleeping apartment.

“All through the history of insanity the student has occasion to observe this close alliance of sexual and religious ideas; an alliance which may be partly accounted for because of the prominence which sexual themes have in most creeds, as illustrated in ancient times by the phallus worship of the Egyptians, the ceremonies of the Friga cultus of the Saxons, the frequent and detailed reference to sexual topics in the Koran and several other books of the kind, and which is further illustrated in the performances which, to come down to a modern period, characterize the religious revival and camp-meeting as they tinctured their medieval model, the Münster Anabaptist movement.”125

Men, owing to their greater freedom, soon learn the difference of the sexes and the delights of sexual congress; women, hedged in by conventionalities and deterred by their innate passivity, remain, for the most part, in ignorance of sexual knowledge until their marriage. For this reason it happens that very many more women than men experience religious emotion. Young married men and women, who are in perfect sexual health, and who have not experienced religion before marriage, seldom give this emotion a single thought until late in life, when both libido and vita sexualis are on the wane or are extinct. Voltaire cynically, though truthfully, observes that when woman is no longer pleasing to man she then turns to God. A woman who has been disappointed in love almost invariably seeks consolation in religion. The virtuous unmarried woman, who has been unsuccessful in the pursuit of a husband, invariably turns to God and religion with impassioned zeal and energy.

Ungratified, or, rather, unsatisfied, sensuality very frequently gives rise to great religio-sexual enthusiasm. The circumcised foreskin of Christ, where it was and what had become of it, was a source of continual worriment to the nun Blanbekin; in an ecstacy of ungratified libido, St. Catherine of Genoa would frequently cast herself on the hard floor of her cell, crying: “Love! love! I can endure it no longer;” St. Armelle and St. Elizabeth were troubled with libido for the child Jesus;126 an old prayer is quite significant: “Oh, that I had found thee, Holy Emanuel; Oh, that I had thee in my bed to bring delight to body and soul! Come and be mine, and my heart shall be thy resting-place.”127 Francis Parkman calls attention to the fact that the nuns sent over to America in colonization days were frequently seized with religio-sexual frenzy. “She heard,” writes he of Marie de l’Incarnation, “in a trance, a miraculous voice. It was that of Christ, promising to become her spouse. Months and years passed, full of troubled hopes and fears, when again the voice sounded in her ear, with assurance that the promise was fulfilled, and that she was, indeed, his bride. Now ensued phenomena which are not infrequent among Roman Catholic female devotees, when unmarried, or married unhappily, and which have their source in the necessities of a woman’s nature.” (The italics are my own.) “To her excited thought, her divine spouse became a living presence; and her language to him, as recorded by herself, is of intense passion. She went to prayer, agitated and tremulous, as if to a meeting with an earthly lover: ‘Oh, my Love,’ she exclaimed, ‘when shall I embrace you? Have you no pity on the torments that I suffer? Alas! alas! my Love, my Beauty, my Life! Instead of healing my pain, you take pleasure in it. Come, let me embrace you, and die in your sacred arms!’”128 The historian remarks that the “holy widow,” as her biographers call her, is an example, and a lamentable one, of the tendency of the erotic principle to ally itself with high religious excitement and enthusiasm. Further along he says that “some of the pupils of Marie de l’Incarnation, also, had mystical marriages with Christ; and the impassioned rhapsodies of one of them being overheard, she nearly lost her character, as it was thought that she was apostrophizing an earthly lover.”129

The instances of religio-sexual outbursts in nuns and Roman Catholic female devotees who lead celibate lives are very numerous; I will, however, call attention to but one other: St. Veronica was so much in love with the divine lion that she took a young lion to bed with her, fondled and kissed it, and allowed it to suck her breasts.130 Throughout sacred literature, beginning with the Bible itself, religio-sexual feeling is very much en evidence. Hosea married a prostitute because—so he declared—God commanded him so to do. If Solomon’s beautiful song is typical of the Church and the Christ (as some theologians teach), then it is an unmistakable instance of religio-sexual feeling; religious emotion and sexual desire walk hand in hand through the measures of this impassioned verse. Circumcision, now eminently a religious ceremony, was, unquestionably, a sexual fetich and a phallic rite, which has been handed down from antiquity, when all the world were phallic worshipers! The very pillars set up by the patriarchs in commemoration of certain events were but rude images of the phallus, while not a few of the mysteries of the Holy of Holies itself were but vestiges of Chaldean and Egyptian genital worship!131

That a relationship between, and an interchangeableness of, these two widely dissimilar psychical operations, i.e., religious emotion and sexual desire, does exist, there can be no doubt.132 Now, what is the cause of, the reason for, this relationship? Mantegazza, Maudsley, Schleiermacher, Krafft-Ebing, and many others have endeavored, incidentally, to assign reasons for this relationship, but have, in my opinion, signally failed. Spitzka has tentatively, and without elaborating his idea in the least, suggested a theory which, I believe, solves the problem in every essential point. Says he in “Insanity,” page 39: This “alliance” (between religious emotion and libido) “may be partly accounted for because of the prominence which sexual themes have in most creeds, as illustrated in ancient times by the phallus worship of the Egyptians, the ceremonies of the Friga cultus of the Saxons, the frequent and detailed reference to sexual topics in the Koran and several other books of the kind, etc.” Dr. Spitzka does not enter into any discussion of the matter; he simply asserts his belief in the cause of the relationship, and then dismisses the subject without further comment.

Now, permit me, as briefly as possible, to designate the cause of the relationship between, and the interchangeableness of, religious feeling and sexual desire, which, as I believe, is to be found in the once widespread existence of phallic worship.

Some ten or twelve years ago, in an article on Suicide, which was published in the American Practitioner and News, I suggested (as a possible explanation for certain psychical phenomena) the existence in man of two consciousnesses, an active, vigilant consciousness and a pseudo-dormant consciousness. Again, in the American Naturalist, in an essay entitled “The Psychology of Hypnotism,”133 I reasserted this theory and, to a certain extent, elaborated it. I placed man’s active consciousness in the cortical portion of the brain, and his pseudo-dormant, unconscious consciousness (arbitrarily, be it confessed) in the basilar ganglia, and called this latter consciousness, “ganglionic consciousness.”

Recently, much has been written on the doctrine of duplex personality, notably by Mr. F. W. H. Myers, in a series of papers read before the Society of Psychical Research. Professor Newbold has also written very entertainingly and instructively on this subject. While not fully accepting the theory of “duplex personality,” i. e., active consciousness and subliminal consciousness (Myers’ name for the pseudo-dormant consciousness), as having been proven, Newbold says: “Of all the theories developed from the point of independence, Mr. Myers’ is the most comprehensive in its scope, is kept in most constant touch with what the author regards as facts, and displays the greatest philosophic insight.”134 According to the theory of duplex personality, many instincts, desires, and emotions have been crowded out of the active consciousness and have been relegated to the pseudo-dormant consciousness. This has been brought about by a “process of selection out of an infinity of possible elements solely on the grounds of utility.” Thus the cause for our horror of incest is hidden away in our subliminal consciousness; yet we cannot but think, with Westermarck, that this instinct is but the result of natural selection,135 the utility of the factor or factors occasioning it being no longer in evidence or required. Again, at certain seasons, man is seized with waldliebe (forest-love) and longs to flee from the haunts of men, and, with gun and rod, to revert, as far as possible, to the state of his savage ancestors. The desire is safely hidden away in his subliminal consciousness until favoring circumstances tempt it forth. It is not alone in “sleep, dreams, hypnosis, trance, and ecstacy that we see a temporary subsidence of the upper consciousness and the upheaval of a subliminal stratum”; there are many other states and many other causes for this strange psychical phenomenon.

I have demonstrated in the preceding pages that the worship of the generative principle was almost, if not wholly, universal; I have also shown that the beliefs, rites, and ceremonies of this cult made a lasting impression upon the minds of every people among whom it gained a foothold. Take the case of the ancient Hebrews. Notwithstanding the fact that they were tried in the furnace of Javeh’s awful wrath time and again; notwithstanding the fact that famine, pestilence, war, and imprisonment destroyed them by thousands; and, notwithstanding the fact that they were threatened with utter and absolute annihilation—all on account of this cult—they would not wholly abandon it. The words of the prophets become almost pathetic as we read, over and over again, that, although the kings did that which was pleasing in the sight of the Lord, “the high places and the groves were not destroyed.” Take the case of the Aztecs. Crushed beneath the iron heels of Spain’s hardy buccaneers, an utterly broken and conquered race, Cortez turned them over to the ministering care of his zealous priests. The prison, agonizing torture, and the awful stake succeeded, at last, in Christianizing them; they became children of Holy Mother Church! And yet, hundreds of years after this “glorious victory of the cross,” Biart finds the humble offerings of their descendants at the feet of Mictlanteuctli! The modern Christian Indian, in the deep shadows of the night, steals forth to offer up in secrecy a prayer at the feet of one of the phallic trinity! What matters it to the modern Aztec that his petition is offered to the ruler of Mictlan, the hell of his forefathers, instead of to the mighty Ipalnemoani, the Life-Giver?136 In his opinion, Mictlanteuctli represents the entire Aztec theogony, for has not his white priest kept the name of this god green in his memory? All the other gods have been forgotten; their personalities have been absorbed into that of the god of hell, for he has had advertisers in the shape of Catholic priests ever since the fall of the Aztec Empire! Take the case of the Peruvians. Although the Place of Gold and the beautiful Virgins of the Sun are not even memories to the descendants of the Incas, the religion which gave rise to them is not wholly forgotten; “phallic rites and ceremonies are to be observed interwoven with their Christian ritual and belief!” Take the case of the Roman Catholic devotees of Isernia, of Varailles, of Lyons, of hundreds of other places during the latter half of the eighteenth century. Priapus died when the first Christian emperor took his seat on the throne of Imperial Rome, and yet, hundreds and hundreds of years thereafter, we behold some of the mysteries of Eleusis almost within the shadow of St. Peter’s!

Now, why is this? There can be but one answer, and that is that these people simply inherited a portion of the psychos of their forefathers, which made the tenets of this religion natural and easy of belief. I have demonstrated, I believe, that religious feeling was not a psychical trait in the beginning; like a number of other mental attributes, it was the result of evolution.137 Mental abstraction, especially as associated with religious feeling, was the result of psychical growth, of psychically inherited experiences.138 As psychos grew beneath the fostering influence of ages of experience, the mind became able to formulate abstract thought. In the beginning, the process of ratiocination was, necessarily, very simple; but, simple as it was, it was able to recognize the source of life—first, in the sun, then, in the second place, in man himself; and, finally and abstractly, in a source outside of, but connected with, man. This abstract source, which sprung from sexuality, ab initio, they deified and worshiped. Thus we see that, in the very beginning, the worship of the generative principle sprung from, and was a part of, man himself. Throughout thousands and thousands of years, religious feeling and sexual desire, the component parts of phallic adoration, were intimately associated; finally, religio-sexuality became an instinct, just as a belief in the existence of a double or soul became an instinct.

Belief in the existence of a soul has never been repressed; its utility is still recognized; hence, it is present in our active consciousness. The accumulated experiences of civilization have, however, declared the inutility of phallic worship, hence, it has been crowded out of our active consciousness by a process of selection and has been relegated to the innermost recesses of our subliminal consciousness, where also dwell many other formerly active instincts of our savage ancestors. When circumstances favoring their appearances occur, these pseudo-dormant instincts always become evident; it is due to this fact that the correlation of religious emotion and sexual desire exists.

VIRAGINITY AND EFFEMINATION

In following up the chain of evolution in animal life from its inception in primordial protoplasm to its end, as we now find it, we discover that the interlinking organisms are, in the beginning, either asexual or hermaphroditic. The moneron, the lowest form of animal life, simply multiplies by division. The different elements through which propagation and generation are carried on, are undoubtedly present even in the moneron, but are not differentiated. The moneron is an organless, structureless organism, consequently asexual. The cell, on the contrary, is hermaphroditic, for it contains within itself the necessary elements for reproducing itself. The amœba is the connecting link which connects all terrene life with primitive bathybian protoplasm, and is, strictly speaking, a true hermaphrodite. Ascending at once to the sixth stage in the ancestry of man, we come to the acoelomi, or worms without body cavity. These worms are phylogenetic, consequently hermaphroditic. I do not mean to say that these worms have the organs of each sex equally developed; therefore, in the use of the word hermaphrodite, I use it in its broadest sense. I simply mean that they are autogenetic. In the rhabdocoela the sexual organs appear in their simplest forms—a testis anterior to a single or double ovary. Other gliding worms have a more complex arrangement of the sexual organs, but most of them are true hermaphrodites. Next in the chain of evolutionary development, and one step nearer man, we find the soft worms (scolecidae); from a branch of this family the parent group of vertebrates was developed. The immediate ancestor of the vertebrates was either the amphioxus (lancelet) or some other notochordate animal, whose type is now extinct. Thus we have traced hermaphroditism from the amœba to the amphioxus, from the ancestor of the parent cell to the ancestor of the vertebrates. We could carry it further, but it is unnecessary. Effemination and viraginity, are due directly to the influence of that strange law laid down by Darwin—the law of reversion to ancestral types. It is an effort of nature to return man to the old hermaphroditic form from which he was evolved. It is an effort on the part of nature to incorporate the individualities of the male and female, both physical and psychical, in one body. The phenomenon of atavism is more apt to occur in feeble types than in strong, healthy and well-developed types. Microcephalism, occurring, as it most frequently does, among ignorant, ill-nourished, and unhealthy people, is an example. Dolichocephalism and a flattening of the cranial arch, with corresponding loss of capacity in the skull—types that we see everywhere among the depraved and vicious—are other examples of this tendency of atavism to seize on weakened and unhealthy subjects. Effemination finds more victims among the wealthy and the educated than among the poor and uneducated. This phenomenon is a psychic rather than a physical hermaphroditism, and is directly traceable to the enervation produced by the habits of the wealthy and unemployed. Wealth begets luxury, luxury begets debauchery and consequent enervation. Periods of moral decadence in the life of a nation are always coincident with periods of luxury and great wealth, with consequent enervation and effemination; examples of this may be found in the histories of Rome, Greece, and France. During the reign of Louis XV., examples of effemination crowded into the court and vied with the royal fop in the splendor of their raiment and effeminacy of their bearing. Psychic hermaphroditism does not occur naturally in uncivilized or half-civilized races. The reason for this is patent. Atavism finds among them no weakened and enervated subjects on whom to perpetrate this strange travesty on nature.

Large cities are the hotbeds and breeding-places of the various neuroses. There general paresis treads closely upon the heels of sexual neurasthenia, while the victims of hysteria and kindred ills are almost countless in their number. What wonder, then, that the offspring of such parents should be weak and neurasthenic, and fall easy victims to the thousand and one erotic fancies which beset them! What wonder that here atavism finds its richest field, and plays its strangest and most fearful pranks, sending men into the world with the tastes, desires, and habits of women, and women with all the mental hibitudes of men! Juvenal wrote in scathing, searing sarcasm of the degeneracy of the Roman youth; effemination was very prevalent, and this bitter satirist wrote burning words against their degrading and bestial practices. It seems to me that we are beginning to need a Juvenal for this day and generation!

People divide themselves into classes, and these classes are generally exceedingly clannish. It is not considered “good form” to marry out of the class to which an individual may belong, consequently, no new types of individuals are added. Luxury and debauchery enervate the classes which indulge in them. The people of these classes intermarry among themselves, no new blood is added, hence, in a very few generations, degeneration sets in.

Effemination and viraginity are common types of degeneration which always follow in the wake of luxury and debauchery. Effemination makes its appearance early in life. The young boy likes the society of girls; he plays with dolls, and, if permitted, will don female attire and dress his hair like a girl. He learns to sew, to knit, to embroider, to do “tatting.” He becomes a connoisseur in female dress, and likes to discuss matters pertaining to the toilet of females. He does not care for boyish sports, and when he grows older, takes no pleasure in the amusements and pursuits of his masculine acquaintances. He prefers to spend his time with women and to engage in their employments and amusements. As the change in his psychic being becomes more pronounced and more overpowering, he will endeavor to approach the female in gait, attitude, and style of dress.

I have seen mothers guilty of incalculable harm by fostering such inclinations in their sons. They think (the thought is a natural one) that such perversions of taste indicate gentleness and kindliness, and induce their sons to continue in the practice of them, thus assisting atavism in its baneful work.

Effemination is a disease which, taken at its inception, can generally be eradicated and cured. As soon as it is discovered, the boy’s surroundings should be changed; his mind should be directed into new channels, and his dormant boy’s nature aroused. Outdoor exercise and a free intercourse with companions of his own sex should be made important factors in the treatment of an incipient effeminant. He should be carefully watched until vita sexualis has been established; he should then be taught the dangers of youthful follies and indiscretions.

A dandified man is always ridiculous, but when he adds to his foppery, effemination, he then becomes contemptible.

Several years ago I had the opportunity of studying a pronounced effeminant. He is one of the best known young men of a Southern city, and is a leader in society. He took me to his “boudoir” and showed me his “lingerie.” The words quoted are his own. His nightgowns were marvels of artistic needlework, as far as I was able to judge, and were made by himself. His nightcaps were “sweetly pretty,” and one of them was a “perfect dream of beauty.” On his dressing-table were all the accessories of a modern society woman’s toilet, including rouge, powder, a complete manicure set, and numerous bottles of perfumes and toilet waters. In his wardrobe he had displayed on forms, some six or eight corsets and chemisettes—“corset-covers,” as he designated them.