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

“men of the town, and particularly those who have been polished in France, make use of the most coarse and uncivilised words in our language and utter themselves often in such a manner as a clown would blush to hear.”

 

[FN#357] See the Novelle of Bandello the Bishop (Tome 1, Paris, Liseux, 1879, small in 18) where the dying fisherman replies to his confessor, “Oh! Oh! your reverence, to amuse myself with boys was natural to me as for a man to eat and drink; yet you asked me if I sinned against nature!” Amongst the wiser ancients sinning contra naturam was not marrying and begetting children.

 

[FN#358] Avis au Lecteur “L’Amour dans l’Humanit�,” par P.

Mantegazza, traduit par Emilien Chesneau, Paris, Fetscherin et Chuit, 1886.

 

[FN#359] See “H. B.” (Henry Beyle, French Consul at Civita Vecchia) par un des Quarante H. B.” (Prosper M�rimee), Elutheropolis, An mdccclxiv. De l’Imposture du Nazar�en.

 

[FN#360] This detail especially excited the veteran’s curiosity.

The reason proved to be that the scrotum of the unmutilated boy could be used as a kind of bridle for directing the movements of the animal. I find nothing of the kind mentioned in the Sotadical literature of Greece and Rome; although the same cause might be expected everywhere to the same effect. But in Mirabeau (Kadh�sch) a grand seigneur moderne, when his valet-de-chambre de confiance proposes to provide him with women instead of boys, exclaims, “Des femmes! eh! c’est comme si tu me servais un gigot sans manche.” See also infra for “Le poids du tisserand.”

 

[FN#361] See Falconry in the Valley of the Indus, London, John Van Voorst, 1852.

 

[FN#362] Submitted to Government on Dec. 3’, ‘47, and March 2, ‘48, they were printed in “Selections from the Records of the Government of India.” Bombay. New Series. No. xvii. Part 2, 1855.

These are (1) Notes on the Population of Sind, etc., and (2) Brief Notes on the Modes of Intoxication, etc., written in collaboration with my late friend Assistant-Surgeon John E.

Stocks, whose early death was a sore loss to scientific botany.

 

[FN#363] Glycon the Courtesan in Athen. xiii. 84 declares that “boys are handsome only when they resemble women,” and so the Learned Lady in The Nights (vol. v. 160) declares “Boys are likened to girls because folks say, Yonder boy is like a girl.”

For the superior physical beauty of the human male compared with the female, see The Nights, vol. iv. 15; and the boy’s voice before it breaks excels that of any diva.

 

[FN#364] “Mascula,” from the priapiscus, the over-development of clitoris (the veretrum muliebre, in Arabic Abu Tart�r, habens cristam), which enabled her to play the man. Sappho (nat. B.C.

612) has been retoill�e like Mary Stuart, La Brinvilliers, Marie Antoinette and a host of feminine names which have a savour not of sanctity. Maximus of Tyre (Dissert. xxiv.) declares that the Eros of Sappho was Socratic and that Gyrinna and Atthis were as Alcibiades and Chermides to Socrates: Ovid who could consult documents now lost, takes the same view in the Letter of Sappho to Phaon and in Tristia ii. 265.

 

Lesbia quid docuit Sappho nisi amare puellas?

 

Suidas supports Ovid. Longinus eulogises the (a term applied only to carnal love) of the far-famed Ode to Atthis:—

 

Ille m� par esse Deo videtur *

(Heureux! qui pr�s de toi pour toi seule soupire *

Blest as th’ immortal gods is he, etc.) By its love symptoms, suggesting that possession is the sole cure for passion, Erasistratus discovered the love of Antiochus for Stratonice. Mure (Hist. of Greek Literature, 1850) speaks of the Ode to Aphrodite (Frag. 1) as “one in which the whole volume of Greek literature offers the most powerful concentration into one brilliant focus of the modes in which amatory concupiscence can display itself.” But Bernhardy, Bode, Richter, K. O. M�ller and esp. Welcker have made Sappho a model of purity, much like some of our dull wits who have converted Shakespeare, that most debauched genius, into a good British bourgeois.

 

[FN#365] The Arabic Sabh�kah, the Tractatrix or Subigitatrix who has been noticed in vol. iv. 134. Hence to Lesbianise ( ) and tribassare ( ); the former applied to the love of woman for woman and the latter to its mecanique: this is either natural, as friction of the labia and insertion of the clitoris when unusually developed, or artificial by means of the fascinum, the artificial penis (the Persian “May�jang”); the patte de chat, the banana-fruit and a multitude of other succedanea. As this feminine perversion is only glanced at in The Nights I need hardly enlarge upon the subject.

 

[FN#366] Plato (Symp.) is probably mystical when he accounts for such passions by there being in the beginning three species of humanity, men, women and men-women or androgynes. When the latter were destroyed by Zeus for rebellion, the two others were individually divided into equal parts. Hence each division seeks its other half in the same sex, the primitive man prefers men and the primitive woman women. C’est beau, but—is it true? The idea was probably derived from Egypt which supplied the Hebrews with androgynic humanity, and thence it passed to extreme India, where Shiva as Ardhan�r� was male on one side and female on the other side of the body, combining paternal and maternal qualities and functions. The first creation of humans (Gen. i. 27) was hermaphrodite (=Hermes and Venus), masculum et f�minam creavit eos—male and female created He them—on the sixth day, with the command to increase and multiply (ibid. v. 28), while Eve the woman was created subsequently. Meanwhile, say certain Talmudists, Adam carnally copulated with all races of animals.

See L’Anandryne in Mirabeau’s Erotika Biblion, where Antoinette Bourgnon laments the undoubling which disfigured the work of God, producing monsters incapable of independent self-reproduction like the vegetable kingdom.

 

[FN#367] De la Femme, Paris, 1827.

 

[FN#368] Die Lustseuche des Alterthum’s, Halle, 1839.

 

[FN#369] See his exhaustive article on (Grecian) “Paederastie” in the Allgemeine Encyclop�die of Ersch and Gruber, Leipzig, Brockhaus, 1837. He carefully traces it through the several states, Dorians, �olians, Ionians, the Attic cities and those of Asia Minor. For these details I must refer my readers to M.

Meier; a full account of these would fill a volume not the section of an essay.

 

[FN#370] Against which see Henri Estienne, Apologie pour H�rodote, a society satire of xvith century, lately reprinted by Liseux.

 

[FN#371] In Sparta the lover was called or x and the beloved as in Thessaly or x.

 

[FN#372] The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself. Zeus, who became Jupiter, was an ancient king, according to the Cretans, who were entitled liars because they showed his burial-place. From a deified ancestor he would become a local god, like the Hebrew Jehovah as opposed to Chemosh of Moab; the name would gain amplitude by long time and distant travel, and the old island chieftain would end in becoming the Demiurgus. Ganymede (who possibly gave rise to the old Lat. “Catamitus”) was probably some fair Phrygian boy (“son of Tros”) who in process of time became a symbol of the wise man seized by the eagle (perspicacity) to be raised amongst the Immortals; and the chaste myth simply signified that only the prudent are loved by the gods. But it rotted with age as do all things human. For the Pederast�a of the Gods see Bayle under Chrysippe.

 

[FN#373] See Dissertation sur les id�es morales des Grecs et sur les dangers de lire Platon. Par M. Aud�, Bibliophile, Rouen, Lemonnyer, 1879. This is the pseudonym of the late Octave Delepierre, who published with Gay, but not the Editio Princeps—which, if I remember rightly, contains much more matter.

 

[FN#374] The phrase of J. Matthias Gesner, Comm. Reg. Soc.

Gottingen i. 1-32. It was founded upon Erasmus’ “Sancte Socrate, ore pro nobis,” and the article was translated by M. Alcide Bonmaire, Paris, Liseux, 1877.

 

[FN#375] The subject has employed many a pen, e.g.,Alcibiade Fanciullo a Scola, D. P. A. (supposed to be Pietro Aretino—ad captandum?), Oranges, par Juann Wart, 1652: small square 8vo of pp. 102, including 3 preliminary pp. and at end an unpaged leaf with 4 sonnets, almost Venetian, by V. M. There is a re-impression of the same date, a small 12mo of longer format, pp. 124 with pp. 2 for sonnets: in 1862 the Imprimerie Racon printed 102 copies in 8vo of pp. iv.-108, and in 1863 it was condemned by the police as a liber spurcissimus atque execrandus de criminis sodomici laude et arte. This work produced “Alcibiade Enfant � l’�cole,” traduit pour la premi�re fois de l’Italien de Ferrante Pallavicini, Amsterdam, chez l’Ancien Pierre Marteau, mdccclxvi. Pallavicini (nat. 1618), who wrote against Rome, was beheaded, aet. 26 (March 5, 1644), at Avignon in 1644 by the vengeance of the Barberini: he was a bel esprit d�r�gl�, nourri d’�tudes antiques and a Memb. of the Acad. Degl’ Incogniti. His peculiarities are shown by his “Opere Scelte,” 2 vols. 12mo, Villafranca, mdclxiii.; these do not include Alcibiade Fanciullo, a dialogue between Philotimus and Alcibiades which seems to be a mere skit at the Jesuits and their P�ch� philosophique. Then came the “Dissertation sur l’Alcibiade fanciullo a scola,” traduit de l’Italien de Giambattista Baseggio et accompagn�e de notes et d’une post-face par un bibliophile francais (M. Gustave Brunet, Librarian of Bordeaux), Paris. J. Gay, 1861—an octavo of pp. 78

(paged), 254 copies. The. same Baseggio printed in 1850 his Disquisizioni (23 copies) and claims for F. Pallavicini the authorship of Alcibiades which the Manuel du Libraire wrongly attributes to M. Girol. Adda in 1859. I have heard of but not seen the “Amator fornaceus, amator ineptus” (Palladii, 1633) supposed by some to be the origin of Alcibiade Fanciullo; but most critics consider it a poor and insipid production.

 

[FN#376] The word is from numbness, torpor, narcotism: the flowers, being loved by the infernal gods, were offered to the Furies. Narcissus and Hippolytus are often assumed as types of morose voluptas, masturbation and clitorisation for nymphomania: certain medi�val writers found in the former a type of the Saviour, and ‘Mirabeau a representation of the androgynous or first Adam: to me Narcissus suggests the Hindu Vishnu absorbed in the contemplation of his own perfections.

 

[FN#377] The verse of Ovid is parallel’d by the song of Al-Z�hir al-Jazari (Ibn Khall. iii. 720).

 

Illum impuberem amaverunt mares; puberem femin�.

Gloria Deo! nunquam amatoribus carebit.

 

[FN#378] The venerable society of prostitutes contained three chief classes. The first and lowest were the Dicteriads, so called from Diete (Crete), who imitated Pasipha�, wife of Minos, in preferring a bull to a husband; above them was the middle class, the Aleutrid�, who were the Almahs or professional musicians, and the aristocracy was represented by the Hetairai, whose wit and learning enabled them to adorn more than one page of Grecian history. The grave Solon, who had studied in Egypt, established a vast Dicterion (Philemon in his Delphica), or bordel whose proceeds swelled the revenue of the Republic.

 

[FN#379] This and Saint Paul (Romans i. 27) suggested to Caravaggio his picture of St. Rosario (in the museum of the Grand Duke of Tuscany), showing a circle of thirty men turpiter ligati.

 

[FN#380] Properly speaking, “Medicus” is the third or ring finger, as shown by the old Chiromantist verses, Est pollex Veneris; sed Jupiter indice gaudet, Saturnus medium; Sol medicumque tenet.

 

[FN#381] So Seneca uses digito scalpit caput. The modern Italian does the same by inserting the thumb-tip between the index and medius to suggest the clitoris.

 

[FN#382] What can be wittier than the now trite Tale of the Ephesian Matron, whose dry humour is worthy of The Nights? No wonder that it has made