A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W X Z

The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10

R >> Richard F. Burton >> The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10




Syria and Palestine, another ancient focus of abominations,
borrowed from Egypt and exaggerated the worship of androgynic and
hermaphroditic deities. Plutarch (De Iside) notes that the old
Nilotes held the moon to be of "male-female sex," the men
sacrificing to Luna and the women to Lunus.[FN#387] Isis also was
a hermaphrodite, the idea being that Aether or Air (the lower
heavens) was the menstruum of generative nature; and Damascius
explained the tenet by the all-fruitful and prolific powers of
the atmosphere. Hence the fragment attributed to Orpheus, the
song of Jupiter (Air):--

All things from Jove descend
Jove was a male, Jove was a deathless bride;
For men call Air, of two fold sex, the Jove.

Julius Pirmicus relates that "The Assyrians and part of the
Africians" (along the Mediterranean seaboard?) "hold Air to be
the chief element and adore its fanciful figure (imaginata
figura), consecrated under the name of Juno or the Virgin Venus.
* * * Their companies of priests cannot duly serve her unless
they effeminate their faces, smooth their skins and disgrace
their masculine sex by feminine ornaments. You may see men in
their very temples amid general groans enduring miserable
dalliance and becoming passives like women (viros muliebria
pati), and they expose, with boasting and ostentation, the
pollution of the impure and immodest body." Here we find the
religious significance of eunuchry. It was practiced as a
religious rite by the Tympanotribas or Gallus,[FN#388] the
castrated votary of Rhea or Bona Mater, in Phrygia called Cybele,
self mutilated but not in memory of Atys; and by a host of other
creeds: even Christianity, as sundry texts show,[FN#389] could
not altogether cast out the old possession. Here too we have an
explanation of Sotadic love in its second stage, when it became,
like cannibalism, a matter of superstition. Assuming a nature-
implanted tendency, we see that like human sacrifice it was held
to be the most acceptable offering to the God-goddess in the
Orgia or sacred ceremonies, a something set apart for peculiar
worship. Hence in Rome as in Egypt the temples of Isis (Inachidos
limina, Isiacae sacraria Lunae) were centres of sodomy, and the
religious practice was adopted by the grand priestly castes from
Mesopotamia to Mexico and Peru.

We find the earliest written notices of the Vice in the mythical
destruction of the Pentapolis (Gen. xix.), Sodom, Gomorrah (=
'Amirah, the cultivated country), Adama, Zeboim and Zoar or Bela.
The legend has been amply embroidered by the Rabbis who make the
Sodomites do everything a l'envers: e.g., if a man were wounded
he was fined for bloodshed and was compelled to fee the offender;
and if one cut off the ear of a neighbour's ass he was condemned
to keep the animal till the ear grew again. The Jewish doctors
declare the people to have been a race of sharpers with rogues
for magistrates, and thus they justify the judgment which they
read literally. But the traveller cannot accept it. I have
carefully examined the lands at the North and at the South of
that most beautiful lake, the so-called Dead Sea, whose tranquil
loveliness, backed by the grand plateau of Moab, is an object of
admiration to all save patients suffering from the strange
disease "Holy Land on the Brain."[FN#390] But I found no traces
of craters in the neighbourhood, no signs of vulcanism, no
remains of "meteoric stones": the asphalt which named the water
is a mineralised vegetable washed out of the limestones, and the
sulphur and salt are brought down by the Jordan into a lake
without issue. I must therefore look upon the history as a myth
which may have served a double purpose. The first would be to
deter the Jew from the Malthusian practices of his pagan
predecessors, upon whom obloquy was thus cast, so far resembring
the scandalous and absurd legend which explained the names of the
children of Lot by Pheine and Thamma as "Moab" .(Mu-ab) the water
or semen of the father, and "Ammon" as mother's son, that is,
bastard. The fable would also account for the abnormal fissure
containing the lower Jordan and the Dead Sea, which the late Sir
R. I. Murchison used wrong-headedly to call a "Volcano of
Depression": this geological feature, that cuts off the
river-basin from its natural outlet, the Gulf of Eloth (Akabah),
must date from myriads of years before there were "Cities of the
Plains." But the main object of the ancient lawgiver, Osarsiph,
Moses or the Moseidae, was doubtless to discountenance a
perversion prejudicial to the increase of population. And he
speaks with no uncertain voice, Whoso lieth with a beast shall
surely be put to death (Exod. xxii. I9): If a man lie with
mankind as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an
abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall
be upon them (Levit. xx. 13; where v.v. 15-16 threaten with death
man and woman who lie with beasts). Again, There shall be no
whore of the daughters of Israel nor a sodomite of the sons of
Israel (Deut. xxii. 5).

The old commentators on the Sodom-myth are most unsatisfactory,
e.g. Parkhurst, s.v. Kadesh. "From hence we may observe the
peculiar propriety of this punishment of Sodom and of the
neighbouring cities. By their sodomitical impurities they meant
to acknowledge the Heavens as the cause of fruitfulness
independently upon, and in opposition to, Jehovah;[FN#391]
therefore Jehovah, by raining upon them not genial showers but
brimstone from heaven, not only destroyed the inhabitants, but
also changed all that country, which was before as the garden of
God, into brimstone and salt that is not sown nor beareth,
neither any grass groweth therein." It must be owned that to this
Pentapolis was dealt very hard measure for religiously and
diligently practicing a popular rite which a host of cities even
in the present day, as Naples and Shiraz, to mention no others,
affect for simple luxury and affect with impunity. The myth may
probably reduce itself to very small proportions, a few Fellah
villages destroyed by a storm, like that which drove Brennus from
Delphi.

The Hebrews entering Syria found it religionised by Assyria and
Babylonia, whence Accadian Ishtar had passed west and had become
Ashtoreth, Ashtaroth or Ashirah,[FN#392] the Anaitis of Armenia,
the Phoenician Astarte and the Greek Aphrodite, the great Moon-
goddess,[FN#393] who is queen of Heaven and Love. In another
phase she was Venus Mylitta = the Procreatrix, in Chaldaic
Mauludata and in Arabic Moawallidah, she who bringeth forth. She
was worshipped by men habited as women and vice-versa; for which
reason in the Torah (Deut. xx. 5) the sexes are forbidden to
change dress. The male prostitutes were called Kadesh the holy,
the women being Kadeshah, and doubtless gave themselves up to
great excesses. Eusebius (De bit. Const. iii. c. 55) describes a
school of impurity at Aphac, where women and "men who were not
men" practiced all manner of abominations in honour of the Demon
(Venus). Here the Phrygian symbolism of Kybele and Attis (Atys)
had become the Syrian Ba'al Tammuz and Astarte, and the Grecian
Dionaea and Adonis, the anthropomorphic forms of the two greater
lights. The site, Apheca, now Wady al-Afik on the route from
Bayrut to the Cedars, is a glen of wild and wondrous beauty,
fitting frame-work for the loves of goddess and demigod: and the
ruins of the temple destroyed by Constantine contrast with
Nature's work, the glorious fountain, splendidior vitro, which
feeds the River Ibrahim and still at times Adonis runs purple to
the sea.[FN#394]

The Phoenicians spread this androgynic worship over Greece. We
find the consecrated servants and votaries of Corinthian
Aphrodite called Hierodouli (Strabo viii. 6), who aided the ten
thousand courtesans in gracing the Venus-temple: from this
excessive luxury arose the proverb popularised by Horace. One of
the headquarters of the cult was Cyprus where, as Servius relates
(Ad AEn. ii. 632), stood the simulacre of a bearded Aphrodite with
feminine body and costume, sceptered and mitred like a man. The
sexes when worshipping it exchanged habits and here the virginity
was offered in sacrifice: Herodotus (i. c. 199) describes this
defloration at Babylon but sees only the shameful part of the
custom which was a mere consecration of a tribal rite. Everywhere
girls before marriage belong either to the father or to the clan
and thus the maiden paid the debt due to the public before
becoming private property as a wife. The same usage prevailed in
ancient Armenia and in parts of Ethiopia; and Herodotus tells us
that a practice very much like the Babylonian "is found also in
certain parts of the Island of Cyprus:" it is noticed by Justin
(xviii. c. 5) and probably it explains the "Succoth Benoth" or
Damsels' booths which the Babylonians bans planted to the cities
of Samaria.[FN#395] The Jews seem very successfully to have
copied the abominations of their pagan neighbours, even in the
matter of the "dog."[FN#396] In the reign of wicked Rehoboam
(B.C. 975) "There were also sodomites in the land and they did
according to all the abominations of the nations which the Lord
cast out before the children of Israel" (I Kings xiv. 20). The
scandal was abated by zealous King Asa (B.C. 958) whose
grandmother[FN#397] was high-priestess of Priapus (princeps in
sacris Priapi): he took away the sodomites out of the land" (I
Kings XV. I2). Yet the prophets were loud in their complaints,
especially the so-called Isaiah (B.C. 760), "except the Lord of
Hosts had left to us a very small remnant, we should have been as
Sodom (i. 9); and strong measures were required from good King
Josiah (B.C. 641) who amongst other things, "brake down the
houses of the sodomites that were by the house of the Lord, where
the women wove hangings for the grove" (2 Kings xxiii. 7). The
bordels of boys (pueris alienis adhaeseverunt) appear to have been
near the Temple.

Syria has not forgotten her old "praxis." At Damascus I found
some noteworthy cases amongst the religious of the great Amawi
Mosque. As for the Druses we have Burckhardt's authority (Travels
in Syria, etc., p. 202), "unnatural propensities are very common
amongst them."

The Sotadic Zone covers the whole of Asia Minor and Mesopotamia
now occupied by the "unspeakable Turk," a race of born pederasts;
and in the former region we first notice a peculiarity of the
feminine figure, the mammae inclinatae, jacentes et pannosae, which
prevails over all this part of the belt. Whilst the women to the
North and South have, with local exceptions, the mammae stantes of
the European virgin,[FN#398] those of Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan
and Kashmir lose all the fine curves of the bosom, sometimes even
before the first child; and after it the hemispheres take the
form of bags. This cannot result from climate only; the women of
Maratha-land, inhabiting a damper and hotter region than Kashmir,
are noted for fine firm breasts even after parturition. Le Vice
of course prevails more in the cities and towns of Asiatic Turkey
than in the villages; yet even these are infected; while the
nomad Turcomans contrast badly in this point with the Gypsies,
those Badawin of India. The Kurd population is of Iranian origin,
which means that the evil is deeply rooted: I have noted in The
Nights that the great and glorious Saladin was a habitual
pederast. The Armenians, as their national character is, will
prostitute themselves for gain but prefer women to boys: Georgia
supplied Turkey with catamites whilst Circassia sent concubines.
In Mesopotamia the barbarous invader has almost obliterated the
ancient civilisation which is ante-dated only by the Nilotic: the
mysteries of old Babylon nowhere survive save in certain obscure
tribes like the Mandaeans, the Devil-worshippers and the
Ali-ilahi. Entering Persia we find the reverse of Armenia; and,
despite Herodotus, I believe that Iran borrowed her pathologic
love from the peoples of the Tigris-Euphrates Valley and not from
the then insignificant Greeks. But whatever may be its origin,
the corruption is now bred in the bone. It begins in boyhood and
many Persians account for it by paternal severity. Youths arrived
at puberty find none of the facilities with which Europe supplies
fornication. Onanism[FN#399] is to a certain extent discouraged
by circumcision, and meddling with the father's slave-girls and
concubines would be risking cruel punishment if not death. Hence
they use each other by turns, a "puerile practice" known as
Alish-Takish, the Lat. facere vicibus or mutuum facere.
Temperament, media, and atavism recommend the custom to the
general; and after marrying and begetting heirs, Paterfamilias
returns to the Ganymede. Hence all the odes of Hafiz are
addressed to youths, as proved by such Arabic exclamations as
'Afaka 'llah = Allah assain thee (masculine)[FN#400]: the object
is often fanciful but it would be held coarse and immodest to
address an imaginary girl.[FN#401] An illustration of the
penchant is told at Shiraz concerning a certain Mujtahid, the
head of the Shi'ah creed, corresponding with a prince-archbishop
in Europe. A friend once said to him, "There is a question I
would fain address to your Eminence but I lack the daring to do
so." "Ask and fear not," replied the Divine. "It is this, O
Mujtahid! Figure thee in a garden of roses and hyacinths with the
evening breeze waving the cypress-heads, a fair youth of twenty
sitting by thy side and the assurance of perfect privacy. What,
prithee, would be the result?" The holy man bowed the chin of
doubt upon the collar of meditation; and, too honest to lie,
presently whispered, "Allah defend me from such temptation of
Satan!" Yet even in Persia men have not been wanting who have
done their utmost to uproot the Vice: in the same Shiraz they
speak of a father who, finding his son in flagrant delict, put
him to death like Brutus or Lynch of Galway. Such isolated cases,
however, can effect nothing. Chardin tells us that houses of male
prostitution were common in Persia whilst those of women were
unknown: the same is the case in the present day and the boys are
prepared with extreme care by diet, baths, depilation, unguents
and a host of artists in cosmetics.[FN#402] Le Vice is looked
upon at most as a peccadillo and its mention crops up in every
jest-book. When the Isfahan man mocked Shaykh Sa'adi by comparing
the bald pates of Shirazian elders to the bottom of a lota, a
brass cup with a wide-necked opening used in the Hammam, the
witty poet turned its aperture upwards and thereto likened the
well-abused podex of an Isfahani youth. Another favourite piece
of Shirazian "chaff" is to declare that when an Isfahan father
would set up his son in business he provides him with a pound of
rice, meaning that he can sell the result as compost for the
kitchen-garden, and with the price buy another meal: hence the
saying Khakh-i-pai kahu = the soil at the lettuce-root. The
Isfahanis retort with the name of a station or halting-place
between the two cities where, under presence of making travellers
stow away their riding-gear, many a Shirazi had been raped: hence
"Zin o takaltu tu bi-bar" = carry within saddle and saddle-cloth!
A favourite Persian punishment for strangers caught in the Harem
or Gynaeceum is to strip and throw them and expose them to the
embraces of the grooms and negro-slaves. I once asked a Shirazi
how penetration was possible if the patient resisted with all the
force of the sphincter muscle: he smiled and said, "Ah, we
Persians know a trick to get over that; we apply a sharpened tent
peg to the crupper bone (os coccygis) and knock till he opens." A
well known missionary to the East during the last generation was
subjected to this gross insult by one of the Persian Prince-
governors, whom he had infuriated by his conversion-mania: in his
memoirs he alludes to it by mentioning his "dishonoured person;"
but English readers cannot comprehend the full significance of
the confession. About the same time Shaykh Nasr, Governor of
Bushire, a man famed for facetious blackguardism, used to invite
European youngsters serving in the Bombay Marine and ply them
with liquor till they were insensible. Next morning the middies
mostly complained that the champagne had caused a curious
irritation and soreness in la parse-posse. The same Eastern
"Scrogin" would ask his guests if they had ever seen a man-cannon
(Adami-top); and, on their replying in the negative, a grey-beard
slave was dragged in blaspheming and struggling with all his
strength. He was presently placed on all fours and firmly held by
the extremities; his bag-trousers were let down and a dozen
peppercorns were inserted ano suo: the target was a sheet of
paper held at a reasonable distance; the match was applied by a
pinch of cayenne in the nostrils; the sneeze started the
grapeshot and the number of hits on the butt decided the bets. We
can hardly wonder at the loose conduct of Persian women
perpetually mortified by marital pederasty. During the unhappy
campaign of 1856-57 in which, with the exception of a few
brilliant skirmishes, we gained no glory, Sir James Outram and
the Bombay army showing how badly they could work, there was a
formal outburst of the Harems; and even women of princely birth
could not be kept out of the officers' quarters.

The cities of Afghanistan and Sind are thoroughly saturated with
Persian vice, and the people sing

Kadr-i-kus Aughan danad, kadr-i-kunra Kabuli:
The worth of coynte the Afghan knows: Cabul prefers the
other chose![FN#403]

The Afghans are commercial travellers on a large scale and each
caravan is accompanied by a number of boys and lads almost in
woman's attire with kohl'd eyes and rouged cheeks, long tresses
and henna'd fingers and toes, riding luxuriously in Kajawas or
camel-panniers: they are called Kuch-i safari, or travelling
wives, and the husbands trudge patiently by their sides. In
Afghanistan also a frantic debauchery broke out amongst the women
when they found incubi who were not pederasts; and the scandal
was not the most insignificant cause of the general rising at
Cabul (Nov. 1841), and the slaughter of Macnaghten, Burnes and
other British officers.

Resuming our way Eastward we find the Sikhs and the Moslems of
the Panjab much addicted to Le Vice, although the Himalayan
tribes to the north and those lying south, the Rajputs and
Marathas, ignore it. The same may be said of the Kash mirians who
add another Kappa to the tria Kakista, Kappado clans, Kretans,
and Kilicians: the proverb says,

Agar kaht-i-mardum uftad, az in sih jins kam giri;
Eki Afghan, dovvum Sindi[FN#404] siyyum
badjins-i-Kashmiri:

Though of men there be famine yet shun these three-
Afghan, Sindi and rascally Kashmiri.

M. Louis Daville describes the infamies of Lahore and Lakhnau
where he found men dressed as women, with flowing locks under
crowns of flowers, imitating the feminine walk and gestures,
voice and fashion of speech, and ogling their admirers with all
the coquetry of bayaderes. Victor Jacquemont's Journal de Voyage
describes the pederasty of Ranjit Singh, the "Lion of the
Panjab," and his pathic Gulab Singh whom the English inflicted
upon Cashmir as ruler by way of paying for his treason. Yet the
Hindus, I repeat, hold pederasty in abhorrence and are as much
scandalised by being called Gand-mara (anus-beater) or Gandu
(anuser) as Englishmen would be. During the years 1843-44 my
regiment, almost all Hindu Sepoys of the Bombay Presidency, was
stationed at a purgatory called Bandar Gharra,[FN#405] a sandy
flat with a scatter of verdigris-green milk-bush some forty miles
north of Karachi the headquarters. The dirty heap of mud-and-mat
hovels, which represented the adjacent native village, could not
supply a single woman; yet only one case of pederasty came to
light and that after a tragical fashion some years afterwards. A
young Brahman had connection with a soldier comrade of low caste
and this had continued till, in an unhappy hour, the Pariah
patient ventured to become the agent. The latter, in Arab.
Al-Fa'il =the "doer," is not an object of contempt like Al-Maful
= the "done"; and the high caste sepoy, stung by remorse and
revenge, loaded his musket and deliberately shot his paramour. He
was hanged by court martial at Hyderabad and, when his last
wishes were asked, he begged in vain to be suspended by the feet;
the idea being that his soul, polluted by exiting "below the
waist," would be doomed to endless trans-migrations through the
lowest forms of life.

Beyond India, I have stated, the Sotadic Zone begins to broaden
out, embracing all China, Turkistan and Japan. The Chinese, as
far as we know them in the great cities, are omnivorous and
omnifutuentes: they are the chosen people of debauchery, and
their systematic bestiality with ducks, goats, and other animals
is equalled only by their pederasty. Kaempfer and Orlof Toree
(Voyage en Chine) notice the public houses for boys and youths in
China and Japan. Mirabeau (L'Anandryne) describes the tribadism
of their women in hammocks. When Pekin was plundered the Harems
contained a number of balls a little larger than the old
musket-bullet, made of thin silver with a loose pellet of brass
inside somewhat like a grelot;[FN#406] these articles were placed
by the women between the labia and an up-and-down movement on the
bed gave a pleasant titillation when nothing better was to be
procured. They have every artifice of luxury, aphrodisiacs,
erotic perfumes and singular applications. Such are the pills
which, dissolved in water and applied to the glans penis, cause
it to throb and swell: so according to Amerigo Vespucci American
women could artificially increase the size of their husbands'
parts.[FN#407] The Chinese bracelet of caoutchouc studded with
points now takes the place of the Herisson, or Annulus
hirsutus,[FN#408] which was bound between the glans and prepuce.
Of the penis succedaneus, that imitation of the Arbor vitae or
Soter Kosmou, which the Latins called phallus and
fascinum,[FN#409] the French godemiche and the Italians
passatempo and diletto (whence our "dildo"), every kind abounds,
varying from a stuffed "French letter" to a cone of ribbed horn
which looks like an instrument of torture. For the use of men
they have the "merkin,"[FN#410] a heart-shaped article of thin
skin stuffed with cotton and slit with an artificial vagina: two
tapes at the top and one below lash it to the back of a chair.
The erotic literature of the Chinese and Japanese is highly
developed and their illustrations are often facetious as well as
obscene. All are familiar with that of the strong man who by a
blow with his enormous phallus shivers a copper pot; and the
ludicrous contrast of the huge-membered wights who land in the
Isle of Women and presently escape from it, wrinkled and
shrivelled, true Domine Dolittles. Of Turkistan we know little,
but what we know confirms my statement. Mr. Schuyler in his
Turkistan (i. 132) offers an illustration of a "Batchah" (Pers.
bachcheh = catamite), "or singing-boy surrounded by his
admirers." Of the Tartars Master Purchas laconically says (v.
419), "They are addicted to Sodomie or Buggerie." The learned
casuist Dr. Thomas Sanchez the Spaniard had (says Mirabeau in
Kadhesch) to decide a difficult question concerning the
sinfulness of a peculiar erotic perversion. The Jesuits brought
home from Manilla a tailed man whose moveable prolongation of the
os coccygis measured from 7 to 10 inches: he had placed himself
between two women, enjoying one naturally while the other used
his tail as a penis succedaneus. The verdict was incomplete
sodomy and simple fornication. For the islands north of Japan,
the "Sodomitical Sea," and the "nayle of tynne" thrust through
the prepuce to prevent sodomy, see Lib. ii. chap. 4 of Master
Thomas Caudish's Circumnavigation, and vol. vi. of Pinkerton's
Geography translated by Walckenaer.

Passing over to America we find that the Sotadic Zone contains
the whole hemisphere from Behring's Straits to Magellan's. This
prevalence of "mollities" astonishes the anthropologist, who is
apt to consider pederasty the growth of luxury and the especial
product of great and civilised cities, unnecessary and therefore
unknown to simple savagery, where the births of both sexes are
about equal and female infanticide is not practiced. In many
parts of the New World this perversion was accompanied by another
depravity of taste--confirmed cannibalism.[FN#411] The forests
and campos abounded in game from the deer to the pheasant-like
penelope, and the seas and rivers produced an unfailing supply of
excellent fish and shell-fish;[FN#412] yet the Brazilian Tupis
preferred the meat of man to every other food.

A glance at Mr. Bancroft[FN#413] proves the abnormal development
of sodomy amongst the savages and barbarians of the New World.
Even his half-frozen Hyperboreans "possess all the passions which
are supposed to develop most freely under a milder temperature"
(i. 58). "The voluptuousness and polygamy of the North American
Indians, under a temperature of almost perpetual winter, is far
greater than that of the most sensual tropical nations" (Martin's
Brit. Colonies iii. 524). I can quote only a few of the most
remarkable instances. Of the Koniagas of Kadiak Island and the
Thinkleets we read (i. 81-82), "The most repugnant of all their
practices is that of male concubinage. A Kadiak mother will
select her handsomest and most promising boy, and dress and rear
him as a girl, teaching him only domestic duties, keeping him at
women s work, associating him with women and girls, in order to
render his effeminacy complete. Arriving at the age of ten or
fifteen years, he is married to some wealthy man who regards such
a companion as a great acquisition. These male concubines are
called Achnutschik or Schopans" (the authorities quoted being
Holmberg, Langsdorff, Billing, Choris, Lisiansky and Marchand).
The same is the case in Nutka Sound and the Aleutian Islands,
where "male concubinage obtains throughout, but not to the same
extent as amongst the Koniagas." The objects of "unnatural"
affection have their beards carefully plucked out as soon as the
face-hair begins to grow, and their chins are tattooed like those
of the women. In California the first missionaries found the same
practice, the youths being called Joya (Bancroft, i. 415 and
authorities Palon, Crespi, Boscana, Mofras, Torquemada, Duflot
and Fages). The Comanches unite incest with sodomy (i. 515). "In
New Mexico, according to Arlegui, Ribas, and other authors, male
concubinage prevails to a great extent; these loathsome
semblances of humanity, whom to call beastly were a slander upon
beasts, dress themselves in the clothes and perform the functions
of women, the use of weapons being denied them" (i. 585).
Pederasty was systematically practiced by the peoples of Cueba,
Careta, and other parts of Central America. The Caciques and some
of the headmen kept harems of youths who, as soon as destined for
the unclean office, were dressed as women. They went by the name
of Camayoas, and were hated and detested by the good wives (i.
733-74). Of the Nahua nations Father Pierre de Gand (alias de
Musa) writes, "Un certain nombre de pratres n'avaient point de
femmes, sed eorum loco pueros quibus abutebantur. Ce peche etait
si commun dans ce pays que, jeunes ou vieux, tous etaient
infectes; ils y etaient si adonnes que memes les enfants de six
ens s'y livraient" (Ternaux,Campans, Voyages, Serie i. Tom. x. p.
197). Among the Mayas of Yucatan Las Casas declares that the
great prevalence of "unnatural" lust made parents anxious to see
their progeny wedded as soon as possible (Kingsborough's Mex.
Ant. viii. 135). In Vera Paz a god, called by some Chin and by
others Cavial and Maran, taught it by committing the act with
another god. Some fathers gave their sons a boy to use as a
woman, and if any other approached this pathic he was treated as
an adulterer. In Yucatan images were found by Bernal Diaz proving
the sodomitical propensities of the people (Bancroft v. 198). De
Pauw (Recherches Philosophiques sur les Americains, London, I77I)
has much to say about the subject in Mexico generally: in the
northern provinces men married youths who, dressed like women,
were forbidden to carry arms. According to Gomara there were at
Tamalpais houses of male prostitution; and from Diaz and others
we gather that the pecado nefando was the rule. Both in Mexico
and in Peru it might have caused, if it did not justify, the
cruelties of the Conquistadores. Pederasty was also general
throughout Nicaragua, and the early explorers found it amongst
the indigenes of Panama.

Copyright (c) 2007. famouswriterz.com. All rights reserved.