The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, vol 10 by Sir Richard Francis Burton (essential reading TXT) 📖

the wilder tribes dwelling inland. Proceeding Eastward we reach Egypt, that classical region of all abominations which, marvellous to relate, flourished in closest contact with men leading the purest of lives, models of moderation and morality, of religion and virtue. Amongst the ancient Copts Le Vice was part and portion of the Ritual and was represented by two male partridges alternately copulating (Interp. in Priapi Carm. xvii). The evil would have gained strength by the invasion of Cambyses (B.C. 524), whose armies, after the victory over Psammenitus. settled in the Nile-Valley and held it, despite sundry revolts, for some hundred and ninety years. During these six generations the Iranians left their mark upon Lower Egypt and especially, as the late Rogers Bey proved, upon the Fayyum, the most ancient Delta of the Nile.[FN#386] Nor would the evil be diminished by the Hellenes who, under Alexander the Great, “liberator and saviour of Egypt” (B.C. 332), extinguished the native dynasties: the love of the Macedonian for Bagoas the Eunuch being a matter of history. From that time and under the rule of the Ptolemies the morality gradually decayed; the Canopic orgies extended into private life and the debauchery of the men was equalled only by the depravity of the women.

Neither Christianity nor Al-Islam could effect a change for the better; and social morality seems to have been at its worst during the past century when Sonnini travelled (A.D. 1717). The French officer, who is thoroughly trustworthy, draws the darkest picture of the widely spread criminality, especially of the bestiality and the sodomy (chaps. xv.), which formed the “delight of the Egyptians.” During the Napoleonic conquest Jaubert in his letter to General Bruix (p. I9) says, “Les Arabes et les Mamelouks ont trait� quelques-uns de nos prisonniers comme Socrate traitait, dit-on, Alcibiade. Il fallait p�rir ou y passer.” Old Anglo-Egyptians still chuckle over the tale of Sa’id Pasha and M. de Ruyssenaer, the high-dried and highly respectable Consul-General for the Netherlands, who was solemnly advised to make the experiment, active and passive, before offering his opinion upon the subject. In the present age extensive intercourse with Europeans has produced not a reformation but a certain reticence amongst the upper classes: they are as vicious as ever, but they do not care for displaying their vices to the eyes of mocking strangers.

 

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, Isiac� sacraria Lun�) 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, Zebo�m and Zoar or Bela.

The legend has been amply embroidered by the Rabbis who make the Sodomites do everything � 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 Phein� 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 Moseid�, 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 Ph�nician 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 Mauludat� and in Arabic Moawallidah, she who bringeth forth. She was worshipped by men habited as women and vice-vers�; 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 Dion�a 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 framework 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 Ph�nicians 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 �n. 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