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

the grand tour of the world. It is found in the neo-Ph�drus, the tales of Mus�us and in the Septem Sapientes as the “Widow which was comforted.” As the “Fabliau de la Femme qui se fist putain sur la fosse de son Mari,” it tempted Brant�me and La Fontaine; and Abel R�musat shows in his Contes Chinois that it is well known to the Middle Kingdom. Mr. Walter K. Kelly remarks, that the most singular place for such a tale is the “Rule and Exercise of Holy Dying” by Jeremy Taylor, who introduces it into his chapt. v.—“Of the Contingencies of Death and Treating our Dead.” But in those days divines were not mealy-mouthed.

 

[FN#383] Glossarium eroticum lingu� Latin�, sive theogoni�, legum et morum nuptialium apud Romanos explanatio nova, auctore P. P.

(Parisiis, Dondey-Dupr�, 1826, in 8vo). P. P. is supposed to be Chevalier Pierre Pierrugues, an engineer who made a plan of Bordeaux and who annotated the Erotica Biblion. Gay writes, “On s’est servi pour cet ouvrage des travaux in�dits de M. Ie Baron de Schonen, etc. Quant au Chevalier Pierre Pierrugues qu’on d�signait comme l’auteur de ce savant volume, son existence n’est pas bien av�r�e, et quelques bibliographes persistent � penser que ce nom cache la collaboration du Baron de Schonen et d’Eloi Johanneau.” Other glossicists as Blondeau and Forberg have been printed by Liseux, Paris.

 

[FN#384] This magnificent country, which the petty jealousies of Europe condemn, like the glorious regions about Constantinople, to mere barbarism, is tenanted by three Moslem races. The Berbers, who call themselves Tamazight (plur. of Amazigh), are the G�tulian indigenes speaking an Africo-Semitic tongue (see Essai de Grammaire Kabyle, etc., par A. Hanoteau, Paris, Benjamin Duprat). The Arabs, descended from the conquerors in our eighth century, are mostly nomads and camel-breeders. Third and last are the Moors proper, the race dwelling in towns, a mixed breed originally Arabian but modified by six centuries of Spanish residence and showing by thickness of feature and a parchment-coloured skin, resembling the American Octaroon’s, a negro innervation of old date. The latter are well described in “Morocco and the Moors,” etc. (Sampson Low and Co., 1876), by my late friend Dr. Arthur Leared, whose work I should like to see reprinted.

 

[FN#385] Thus somewhat agreeing with one of the multitudinous modern theories that the Pentapolis was destroyed by discharges of meteoric stones during a tremendous thunderstorm. Possible, but where are the stones?

 

[FN#386] To this Iranian domination I attribute the use of many Persic words which are not yet obsolete in Egypt. “Bakhsh�sh,”

for instance, is not intelligible in the Moslem regions west of the Nile-Valley, and for a present the Moors say Had�yah, regalo or favor.

 

[FN#387] Arnobius and Tertullian, with the arrogance of their caste and its miserable ignorance of that symbolism which often concealed from vulgar eyes the most precious mysteries, used to taunt the heathen for praying to deities whose sex they ignored “Consuistis in precibus ‘Seu tu Deus seu tu Dea,’ dicere!” These men would know everything; they made God the merest work of man’s brains and armed him with a despotism of omnipotence which rendered their creation truly dreadful.

 

[FN#388] Gallus lit. = a cock, in pornologic parlance is a capon, a castrato.

 

[FN#389] The texts justifying or enjoining castration are Matt.

xviii. 8-9; Mark ix. 43-47; Luke xxiii. 29 and Col. iii. 5. St.

Paul preached (1 Corin. vii. 29) that a man should live with his wife as if he had none. The Abelian heretics of Africa abstained from women because Abel died virginal. Origen mutilated himself after interpreting too rigorously Matt. xix. 12, and was duly excommunicated. But his disciple, the Arab Valerius founded (A.D.

250) the castrated sect called Valerians who, persecuted and dispersed by the Emperors Constantine and Justinian, became the spiritual fathers of the modern Skopzis. These eunuchs first appeared in Russia at the end of the xith century, when two Greeks, John and Jephrem, were metropolitans of Kiew: the former was brought thither in A.D. 1089 by Princess Anna Wassewolodowna and is called by the chronicles Nawj� or the Corpse. But in the early part of the last century (1715-1733) a sect arose in the circle of Uglitseh and in Moscow, at first called Clisti or flagellants, which developed into the modern Skopzi. For this extensive subject see De Stein (Zeitschrift f�r Ethn. Berlin, 1875) and Mantegazza, chaps. vi.

 

[FN#390] See the marvellously absurd description of the glorious “Dead Sea” in the Purchas v. 84.

 

[FN#391] Jehovah here is made to play an evil part by destroying men instead of teaching them better. But, “Nous faisons les Dieux � notre image et nous portons dans le ciel ce que nous voyons sur la terre.” The idea of Yahweh, or Yah, is palpably Egyptian, the Ankh or ever-living One: the etymon, however, was learned at Babylon and is still found amongst the cuneiforms.

 

[FN#392] The name still survives in the Shajar�t al-Ashar�, a clump of trees near the village Al-Gh�jar (of the Gypsies?) at the foot of Hermon.

 

[FN#393] I am not quite sure that Astarte is not primarily the planet Venus; but I can hardly doubt that Prof. Max M�ller and Sir G. Cox are mistaken in bringing from India Aphrodite the Dawn and her attendants, the Charites identified with the Vedic Harits. Of Ishtar in Accadia, however, Roscher seems to have proved that she is distinctly the Moon sinking into Amenti (the west, the Underworld) in search of her lost spouse Izdubar, the Sun-god. This again is pure Egyptianism.

 

[FN#394] In this classical land of Venus the worship of Ishtar-Ashtaroth is by no means obsolete. The Met�wali heretics, a people of Persian descent and Shiite tenets, and the peasantry of “Bil�d B’sharrah,” which I would derive from Bayt Ashirah, still pilgrimage to the ruins and address their vows to the Sayyidat al-Kab�rah, the Great Lady. Orthodox Moslems accuse them of abominable orgies and point to the lamps and rags which they suspend to a tree entitled Shajarat al-Sitt—the Lady’s tree—an Acacia Albida which, according to some travellers, is found only here and at Sayda (Sidon) where an avenue exists. The people of Kasraw�n, a Christian province in the Libanus, inhabited by a peculiarly prurient race, also hold high festival under the far-famed Cedars, and their women sacrifice to Venus like the Kadashah of the Ph�nicians. This survival of old superstition is unknown to missionary “Handbooks,” but amply deserves the study of the anthropologist.

 

[FN#395] Some commentators understand “the tabernacles sacred to the reproductive powers of women;” and the Rabbis declare that the emblem was the figure of a setting hen.

 

[FN#396] Dog” is applied by the older Jews to the Sodomite and the Catamite, and thus they understand the “price of a dog” which could not be brought into the Temple (Deut. xxiii. 18). I have noticed it in one of the derivations of cin�dus and can only remark that it is a vile libel upon the canine tribe.

 

[FN#397] Her name was Maachah and her title, according to some, “King’s mother”: she founded the sect of Communists who rejected marriage and made adultery and incest part of worship in their splendid temple. Such were the Basilians and the Carpocratians followed in the xith century by Tranchelin, whose sectarians, the Turlupins, long infested Savoy.

 

[FN#398] A noted exception is Vienna, remarkable for the enormous development of the virginal bosoni, which soon becomes pendulent.

 

[FN#399] Gen. xxxviii. 2-11. Amongst the classics Mercury taught the “Art of le Thalaba” to his son Pan who wandered about the mountains distraught with love for the Nymph Echo and Pan passed it on to the pastors. See Thalaba in Mirabeau.

 

[FN#400] The reader of The Nights has remarked how often the “he”

in Arabic poetry denotes a “she”; but the Arab, when uncontaminated by travel, ignores pederasty, and the Arab poet is a Badawi.

 

[FN#401] So Mohammed addressed his girl-wife Ayishah in the masculine.

 

[FN#402] So amongst the Romans we have the Iatrolipt�, youths or girls who wiped the gymnast’s perspiring body with swan-down, a practice renewed by the professors of “Massage”; Unctores who applied perfumes and essences; Fricatrices and Tractatrices or shampooers; Dropacist�, corn-cutters; Alipilarii who plucked the hair, etc., etc., etc.

 

[FN#403] It is a parody on the wellknown song (Roebuck i. sect.

2, No. 1602):

 

The goldsmith knows the worth of gold, jewellers worth of jewelry;

The worth of rose Bulbul can tell and Kambar’s worth his lord, Ali.

 

[FN#404] For “Sind�” Roebuck (Oriental Proverbs Part i. p. 99) has Kunbu (Kumboh) a Panj�bi peasant, and others vary the saying ad libitum. See vol. vi. 156.

 

[FN#405] See “Sind Revisited” i. 133-35.

 

[FN#406] They must not be confounded with the grelots lascifs, the little bells of gold or silver set by the people of Pegu in the prepuce-skin, and described by Nicolo de Conti who however refused to undergo the operation.

 

[FN#407] Relation des d�couvertes faites par Colomb, etc., p.

137: Bologna 1875; also Vespucci’s letter in Ramusio (i. 131) and Paro’s Recherches philosophiques sur les Am�ricains.

 

[FN#408] See Mantegazza loc. cit. who borrows from the Th�se de Paris of Dr. Abel Hureau de Villeneuve, “Frictiones per coitum product� magnum mucos� membran� vaginalis turgorem, ac simul hujus cuniculi coarctationem tam maritis salacibus qu�ritatam afferunt.”

 

[FN#409] Fascinus is the Priapus-god to whom the Vestal Virgins of Rome, professed tribades, sacrificed, also the neck-charm in phallus-shape. Fascinum is the male member.

 

[FN#410] Captain Grose (Lexicon Balatronicum) explains merkin as “counterfeit hair for women’s privy parts. See Bailey’s Dict.”

The Bailey of 1764, an “improved edition,” does not contain the word which is now generally applied to a cunnus succedaneus.

 

[FN#411] I have noticed this phenomenal cannibalism in my notes to Mr. Albert Tootle’s excellent translation of “The Captivity of Hans Stade of Hesse:” London, Hakluyt Society, mdccclxxiv.

 

[FN#412] The Ostreiras or shell mounds of the Brazil, sometimes 200 feet high, are described by me in Anthropologia No. i. Oct.

1873.

 

[FN#413] The Native Races of the Pacific States of South America, by Herbert Howe Bancroft, London, Longmans, 1875.

 

[FN#414] All Peruvian historians mention these giants, who were probably the large-limbed Gribs (Cara�bes) of the Brazil: they will be noticed in page 211.

 

[FN#415] This sounds much like a pious fraud of the missionaries, a Europeo-American version of the Sodom legend.

 

[FN#416] Les Races Aryennes du Perou, Paris, Franck, 1871.

 

[FN#417] O Brazil e os Brazileiros, Santos, 1862.

 

[FN#418] Aethiopia Orientalis, Purchas ii. 1558.

 

[FN#419] Purchas iii. 243.

 

[FN#420] For a literal translation see 1re S�rie de la Curiosit�

Litt�raire et Bibliographique, Paris, Liseux, 1880.

 

[FN#421] His best-known works are (1) Praktisches Handbuch der Gerechtlichen Medecin, Berlin, 1860; and (2) Klinische Novellen zur Gerechtlichen Medecin, Berlin, 1863.

 

[FN#422] The same author printed another imitation of Petronius Arbiter, the “Larissa” story of Th�ophile Viand. His cousin, the S�vign�, highly approved of it. See Bayle’s objections to Rabutin’s delicacy and excuses for Petronius’ grossness in his “�claircissement sur les obsc�nit�s” (Appendice au Dictionnaire Antique).

 

[FN#423] The Boulgrin of Rabelais, which Urquhart renders Ingle for Boulgre, an “indorser,” derived from the Bulgarus or Bulgarian, who gave to Italy the term bugiardo—liar. Bougre and Bougrerie date (Littr�) from the xiiith century. I cannot, however, but think that the trivial term gained strength in the xvith, when the manners of the Bugres or indigenous Brazilians were studied by Huguenot refugees in La France Antartique and several of these savages found their way to Europe. A grand F�te in Rouen on the entrance of Henri II. and Dame Katherine de Medicis (June 16, 1564) showed, as part of the pageant, three hundred men (including fifty “Bugres” or Tupis) with parroquets and other birds and beasts of the newly explored