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INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 AMONG PRIMITIVE FOLK 
 
BY EDWARD CARPENTER 
 
 TOWARDS DEMOCRACY 
 
 love's COMING-OF-AGE 
 A Series of Papers on the Relations of 
 the Sexes 
 
 THE DRAMA OF LOVE AND DEATH 
 
 A Study of Human Evolution and Trans- 
 figuration 
 
 THB INTERMEDIATE SEX 
 
 A Study of Some Traditional Types of 
 Men and Women 
 
 INTERMEDIATE TYPES AMONG PRIMITIVE FOLK 
 
 A Study in Social Evolution 
 
 IOLAUS 
 
 An Anthology of Friendship 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 AMONG PRIMITIVE FOLK 
 
 A STUDY IN SOCIAL EVOLUTION 
 
 By 
 
 Edward Carpenter 
 
 NEW YORK AND LONDON 
 
 MITCHELL KENNERLEY 
 
 MCMXXI 
 
 :. i:|;IM-.l-l- 
 I- l.i MM' 
 
V (■;■' 
 
 A 
 
 j 
 
 /\l?o~]^ 
 
NOTE 
 
 The four chapters forming Part I of this book were originally 
 published in Professor Stanley Hall's American Journal of 
 Religious Psychology for July, 191 1 ; and in the Revue a" Ethno- 
 graphic et de Sociologie of the same date, issued by the Inter- 
 national Ethnographic Institute of Paris. 
 
 With regard to the Dorian institutions in Part II, I owe 
 much to Professor E. Bethe's learned and authoritative 
 treatise on that subject in the Rheinisches Museum filr Phi- 
 lologie, Frankfurt-a-M., 1907. 
 
 E. C. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Page 
 
 Introduction 9 
 
 Part I : 
 The Intermediate in the Service of Religion 
 
 Chapter 
 
 I. As Prophet or Priest 15 
 
 II. As Wizard or Witch 36 
 
 III. As Inventors of the Arts and Crafts 55 
 
 IV. Hermaphrodism among Gods and Mortals 66 
 
 Part II : 
 The Intermediate as Warrior 
 
 V. The Dorian Military Comradeship 87 
 
 VI. Its Relation to the Status of Woman 102 
 
 VII. Its Relation to Civic Life and Religion 117 
 
 VIII. The Samurai of Japan: and their Ideal 137 
 
 Conclusion 161 
 
 Index 175 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 That between the normal man and the normal 
 woman there exist a great number of intermediate 
 types — types, for instance, in which the body may 
 be perfectly feminine, while the mind and feelings 
 are decidedly masculine, or vice versa — is a thing 
 which only a few years ago was very little under- 
 stood. But to-day — thanks to the labours of a number 
 of scientific men — the existence of these types is gen- 
 erally recognised and admitted; it is known that the 
 variations in question, whether affecting the body 
 or the mind, are practically always congenital; 
 and that similar variations have existed in consider- 
 able abundance in all ages and among all races of 
 the world. Since the Christian era these inter- 
 mediate types have been much persecuted in some 
 periods and places, while in others they have been 
 mildly tolerated; but that they might possibly 
 fulfil a positive and useful function of any kind in 
 society is an idea which seems hardly if ever to 
 have been seriously considered. 
 
 9 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 Such an idea, however, must have been familiar 
 in pre-Christian times and among the early civilisa- 
 tions, and if not consciously analysed or general- 
 ised in philosophical form, it none the less underran 
 the working customs and life of many, if not most 
 primitive tribes — in such a way that the interme- 
 diate people and their corresponding sex-relation- 
 ships played a distinct part in the life of the tribe 
 or nation, and were openly acknowledged and 
 recognised as part of the general polity. 
 
 It is probably too early at present to formulate 
 any elaborate theory as to the various workings of 
 this element in the growth of society. It might be 
 easy to enter into a tirade against sex-inversion in 
 general and to point out and insist on all the evils 
 which may actually or possibly flow from it. But 
 this would not be the method either of common- 
 sense or of science; and if one is to understand 
 any widespread human tendency it is obvious that 
 the procedure has to be different from this. One 
 has to enquire first what advantages (if any) may 
 have flowed, or been reported to flow, from the 
 tendency, what place it may possibly have occupied 
 in social life, and what (if any) were its healthy, 
 rather than its unhealthy, manifestations. Investi- 
 gating thus in this case, we are surprised to find 
 how often — according to the views of these early 
 peoples themselves — inversion in some form was 
 10 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 regarded as a necessary part of social life, and 
 the Uranian man accorded a certain meed of 
 honour. 
 
 It would seem — as a first generalisation on this 
 unexplored subject — that there have been two main 
 directions in which the intermediate types have 
 penetrated into the framework of normal society, 
 and made themselves useful if not indispensable. 
 And the two directions have been in some sense 
 opposite, the one being towards service in Warfare 
 and the other towards the service of Religion. It 
 would seem that where the homosexual tendency 
 was of the robuster and more manly sort, leading 
 men to form comrade alliances with each other in 
 the direction of active and practical life, this ten- 
 dency was soon reinforced and taken advantage 
 of by the military spirit. Military comradeship 
 grew into an institution, and the peoples who 
 adopted it became extraordinarily successful in 
 warfare, and overcoming other tribes spread their 
 customs among them. Such was the case with the 
 Dorian Greeks, whose comradeship institutions form 
 the subjects of chapters v., vi., and vii., of this 
 book; and such also appears to have been the case 
 in a somewhat different way with the Samurai of 
 Japan (chapter viii.) in the twelfth and succeeding 
 centuries; and in lesser degree with many Moham- 
 
 ii 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 medan peoples in Arabia, Persia, Afghanistan, and 
 elsewhere. 
 
 On the other hand, it would seem that where the 
 homosexual tendency was of a more effeminate 
 and passive sort, it led to a distaste, on the part 
 of those individuals or groups who were affected 
 by it, for the ordinary masculine occupations and 
 business of the world, and to an inclination to 
 retire into the precincts of the Temples and the 
 services (often sexual) of Religion — which, of 
 course in primitive days, meant not only the 
 religious life in our sense, but the dedication to such 
 things as Magic, learning, poetry, music, prophecy, 
 and other occupations not generally favoured by 
 the normal man, the hunter and the warrior. There 
 are also some considerations which go to show 
 that this class of Intermediate did actually tend to 
 develop faculties like divination, clairvoyance, 
 ecstasy, and so forth, which are generally and quite 
 naturally associated with religion. 
 
 This connection of homosexuality with divination 
 and religion I have made the special subject of 
 the first portion of this book; and it certainly is 
 remarkable to find — even from this slight study — 
 how widespread the connection has been among the 
 primitive peoples and civilisations. 
 
 12 
 
PART I 
 
 THE INTERMEDIATE IN THE SERVICE 
 OF RELIGION 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 AS PROPHET OR PRIEST 
 
 A CURIOUS and interesting subject is the connection 
 of the Uranian temperament with prophetic gifts 
 and divination. It is a subject which, as far as I 
 know, has not been very seriously considered — 
 though it has been touched upon by Elie Reclus 
 Westermarck, Bastian, Iwan Bloch, and others. The 
 fact is well known, of course, that in the temples 
 and cults of antiquity and of primitive races it has 
 been a widespread practice to educate and cultivate 
 certain youths in an effeminate manner, and that 
 these youths in general become the priests or medi- 
 cine-men of the tribe; but this fact has hardly 
 been taken seriously, as indicating any necessary 
 connection between the two functions, or any rela- 
 tion in general between homosexuality and psychic 
 powers. Some such relation or connection, how- 
 ever, I think we must admit as being obviously 
 indicated by the following facts; and the admission 
 
 15 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 leads us on to the further enquiry of what th< 
 relation may exactly be, and what its rationale anc 
 explanation. 
 
 Among the tribes, for instance, in the neighbour 
 hood of Behring's Straits — the Kamchadales, th< 
 Chukchi, the Aleuts, Inoits, Kadiak islanders, anc 
 so forth, homosexuality is common, and its relatior 
 to shamanship or priesthood most marked and 
 curious. Westermarck, in his well-known book 
 The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas* 
 quoting from Dr. Bogoraz, says: — "It frequently 
 happens that, under the supernatural influence oi 
 one of their shamans, or priests, a Chukchi lad a 
 sixteen years of age will suddenly relinquish hii 
 sex and imagine himself to be a woman. H< 
 adopts a woman's attire, lets his hair grow, anc 
 devotes himself altogether to female occupation 
 Furthermore, this disclaimer of his sex takes ; 
 husband into the yttrt (hut) and does all the worl 
 which is usually incumbent on the wife, in mos 
 unnatural and voluntary subjection. . . . Thesi 
 abnormal changes of sex imply the most abjec 
 immorality in the community, and appear to bi 
 strongly encouraged by the shamans, who interpre 
 such cases as an injunction of their individua 
 deity." Further, Westermarck says "the chang 
 
 *2 vols. (Macmillan, 1908), vol. ii., p. 458. 
 16 
 
AS PROPHET OR PRIEST 
 
 of sex was usually accompanied by future shaman- 
 ship; indeed nearly all the shamans were former 
 delinquents of their sex." Again he says, "In 
 describing the Koriaks, Krasheninnikoff makes 
 mention of the Ke'yev, that is men occupying the 
 position of concubines, and he compares them with 
 the Kamchadale Koe'kcuc, as he calls them, that is 
 men transformed into women. Every Koe'kcuc, he 
 says, 'is regarded as a magician and interpreter of 
 dreams. . . . The Koe'kcuc wore women's clothes, 
 did women's work, and were in the position of 
 wives or concubines.' " And (on p. 472) "There 
 is no indication that the North American aborigines 
 attached any opprobrium to men who had inter- 
 course with those members of their own sex who 
 had assumed the dress and habits of women. In 
 Kadiak such a companion was on the contrary 
 regarded as a great acquisition; and the effeminate 
 men, far from being despised, were held in repute 
 by the people, most of them being wizards." 
 
 This connection with wizardry and religious divi- 
 nation is particularly insisted upon by Elie Reclus, 
 in his Primitive Folk (Contemporary Science Series). 
 Speaking of the Inoits (p. 68) he says: — "Has a 
 boy with a pretty face also a graceful demeanour? 
 The mother no longer permits him to associate 
 with companions of his own age, but clothes him 
 and brings him up as a girl. Any stranger would 
 
 17 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 be deceived as to his sex, and when he is about 
 fifteen he is sold for a good round sum to a 
 wealthy personage.* 'Choupans,' or youths of this 
 kind are highly prized by the Konyagas. On the 
 other hand, there are to be met with here and 
 there among the Esquimaux or kindred populations, 
 especially in Youkon, girls who decline marriage 
 and maternity. Changing their sex, so to speak, 
 they live as boys, adopting masculine manners and 
 customs, they hunt the stag, and in the chase shrink 
 from no danger; in fishing from no fatigue." 
 
 Reclus then says that the Choupans commonly 
 dedicate themselves to the priesthood; but all are 
 not qualified for this. "To become an angakok it 
 is needful to have a very marked vocation, and 
 furthermore a character and temperament which 
 every one has not. The priests in office do not 
 leave the recruiting of their pupils to chance; they 
 make choice at an early age of boys or girls, not 
 limiting themselves to one sex — a mark of greater 
 intelligence than is exhibited by most other priest- 
 hoods" (p. 71). The pupil has to go through 
 considerable ordeals: — "Disciplined by abstinence 
 and prolonged vigils, by hardship and constraint, 
 he must learn to endure pain stoically and to 
 subdue his bodily desires, to make the body obey 
 
 •See also Bancroft's Native Races of the Pacific States, vol. i., 
 p. 8a. 
 18 
 
AS PROPHET OR PRIEST 
 
 unmurmuringly the commands of the spirit. Others 
 may be chatterers; he will be silent, as becomes 
 the prophet and the soothsayer. At an early age 
 the novice courts solitude. He wanders throughout 
 the long nights across silent plains filled with the 
 chilly whiteness of the moon; he listens to the 
 wind moaning over the desolate floes; — and then 
 the aurora borealis, that ardently sought occasion 
 for 'drinking in the light,' the angakok must absorb 
 all its brilliancies and splendours. . . . And now the 
 future sorcerer is no longer a child. Many a time 
 he has felt himself in the presence of Sidne, the 
 Esquimaux Demeter, he has divined it by the shiver 
 which ran through his veins, by the tingling of his 
 flesh and the bristling of his hair. . . . He sees 
 stars unknown to the profane; he asks the secrets 
 of destiny from Sirius, Algol, and Altair; he passes 
 through a series of initiations, knowing well that 
 his spirit will not be loosed from the burden of 
 dense matter and crass ignorance, until the moon 
 has looked him in the face, and darted a certain 
 ray into his eyes. At last his own Genius, evoked 
 from the bottomless depths of existence, appears to 
 him, having scaled the immensity of the heavens, 
 and climbed across the abysses of the ocean. 
 White, wan, and solemn, the phantom will say 
 to him: 'Behold me, what dost thou desire?' Unit- 
 ing himself with the Double from beyond the grave, 
 
 19 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 the soul of the angakok flies upon the wings oi 
 the wind, and quitting the body at will, sails swifl 
 and light through the universe. It is permitted tc 
 probe all hidden things, to seek the knowledge oi 
 all mysteries, in order that they may be revealed 
 to those who have remained mortal with spiril 
 unrefined" (p. 73). 
 
 Allowing something for poetic and imaginative 
 expression, the above statement of the ordeals and 
 initiations of the angakok, and their connection with 
 the previous career of the Choupan are well based 
 on the observations of many authorities, as well as 
 on their general agreement with similar facts all 
 over the world. There is also another passage ol 
 Reclus (p. 70) on the duties of the angakok, which 
 seems to throw considerable light on certain pas- 
 sages in the Bible referring to the kedeshim and 
 kedeshoth of the Syrian cults, also on the kosio oi 
 the Slave Coast and the early functions of the 
 priesthood in general: — "As soon as the Choupan 
 has moulted into the angakok, the tribe confide tc 
 him the girls most suitable in bodily grace and 
 disposition; he has to complete their education — 
 he will perfect them in dancing and other accom- 
 plishments, and finally will initiate them into the 
 pleasures of love. If they display intelligence, they 
 will become seers and medicine-women, priestesses 
 and prophetesses. The summer kachims (assem- 
 20 
 
AS PROPHET OR PRIEST 
 
 blies), which are closed to the women of the com- 
 munity, will open wide before these. It is believed 
 that these girls would be unwholesome company if 
 they had not been purified by commerce with a 
 man of God." 
 
 Catlin, in his North American Indians (vol. i., pp. 
 1 1 2-1 14), describes how on one occasion he was 
 in a large tent occupied in painting portraits of 
 some of the chiefs of the tribe (the Mandans) 
 among whom he was staying, when he noticed at 
 the door of the tent, but not venturing to come in, 
 three or four young men of handsome presence 
 and rather elegantly dressed, but not wearing the 
 eagle's feathers of warriors. He mentally decided 
 to paint the portrait of one of these also; and on 
 a later day when he had nearly done with the 
 chiefs, he invited one of these others to come in 
 and stand for him. The youth was overjoyed at 
 the compliment, and smiled all over his face. He 
 was clad from head to foot in the skin of the 
 mountain goat, which for softness and whiteness 
 is almost like Chinese crape, embroidered with 
 ermine and porcupine quills; and with his pipe 
 and his whip in his hand, and his long hair falling 
 over neck, and shoulders, made a striking and hand- 
 some figure, which showed, too, a certain grace 
 and gentleness as of good breeding. "There was 
 nought about him of the terrible," says Catlin, 
 
 21 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 "and nought to shock the finest, chastest intellect." 
 But to Catlin's surprise, no sooner had he begun to 
 sketch his new subject, than the chiefs rose up, 
 flung their buffalo robes around them, and stalked 
 out of the tent. 
 
 Catlin's interpreter afterwards explained to him 
 the position of these men and the part they played 
 in the tribal life; and how the chiefs were offended 
 at the idea of their being placed on an equality 
 with themselves. But the offence, it seemed, was 
 not on any ground of immorality; but — and this 
 is corroborated by the customs of scores of other 
 tribes — arose simply from the fact that the young 
 men were associated with the women, and shared 
 their modes of life, and were not worthy therefore 
 to rank among the warriors. In their own special 
 way they held a position of some honour. 
 
 "Among the Illinois Indians," says Westermarck 
 (vol. ii., p. 473), "the effeminate men assist in [i.e., 
 are present at] all the juggleries and the solemn 
 dance in honour of the calumet, or sacred tobacco- 
 pipe, for which the Indians have such a deference. 
 . . . but they are not permitted either to dance or 
 to sing. They are called into the councils of the 
 Indians, and nothing can be decided without their 
 advice; for because of their extraordinary manner 
 of living they are looked upon as manitous, or 
 supernatural beings, and persons of consequence." 
 22 
 
AS PROPHET OR PRIEST 
 
 "The Sioux, Sacs, and Fox Indians," he continues, 
 "give once a year, or oftener, a feast to the Ber- 
 dashe, or I-coo-coo-a, who is a man dressed in 
 women's clothes, as he has been all his life." 
 And Catlin (N. A. Indians, vol. ii., p. 214) says of 
 this Berdashe: — "For extraordinary privileges 
 which he is known to possess, he is driven to the 
 most servile and degrading duties, which he is not 
 allowed to escape; and he being the only one of 
 the tribe submitting to this disgraceful degradation 
 is looked upon as medicine and sacred, and a 
 feast is given to him annually; and initiatory to it 
 a dance by those few young men of the tribe who 
 can — as in the illustration — dance forward and 
 publicly make their boast (without the denial of the 
 Berdashe) that" [then follow three or four unintel- 
 ligible lines of some native dialect; and then] "such 
 and such only are allowed to enter the dance and 
 partake of the feast." 
 
 In this connection it may not be out of place 
 to quote Joaquin Miller (who spent his early life as 
 a member of an Indian tribe) on the prophetic 
 powers of these people. He says {"Life among the 
 Modocs" p. 360), "If there is a race of men that 
 has the gift of prophecy or prescience I think it is 
 the Indian. It may be a keen instinct sharpened 
 by meditation that makes them foretell many things 
 with such precision, but I have seen some things 
 
 23 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 that looked much like the fulfilment of prophecies. 
 They believe in the gift of prophecy thoroughly, 
 and are never without their seers." 
 
 In this connection we may quote the curious 
 remark of Herodotus, who after mentioning (i. 105) 
 that some of the Scythians suffered from a disease 
 of effeminacy (GiJXeio vSaos), and were called Enarees, 
 says (iv. 67) that "these Enarees, or Androgyni, 
 were endowed by Venus with the power of divina- 
 tion," and were consulted by the King of the Scy- 
 thians when the latter was ill. 
 
 The Jesuit father Lafitau, who published in 1724, 
 at Paris, an extremely interesting book on the 
 manners and customs of the North American tribes 
 among whom he had been a missionary,* after 
 speaking of warlike women and Amazons, says 
 (vol. 1, p. 53) : — "If some women are found 
 possessing virile courage, and glorying in the pro- 
 fession of war, which seems only suitable to men; 
 there exist also men so cowardly as to live like 
 women. Among the Illinois, among the Sioux, in 
 Louisiana, in Florida, and in Yucatan, there are 
 found youths who adopt the garb of women and 
 preserve it all their lives, and who think themselves 
 honoured in stooping to all their occupations; they 
 never marry; they take part in all ceremonies in 
 
 *Moeurs des Sauvages Ameriquains, comparies aux moeurs des 
 premiers temps, par le P. Lafitau (Paris, 1724). 
 24 
 
AS PROPHET OR PRIEST 
 
 which religion seems to be concerned; and this pro- 
 fession of an extraordinary life causes them to pass 
 for beings of a superior order, and above the com- 
 mon run of mankind. Would not these be the same 
 kind of folk as the Asiatic worshippers of Cybele, 
 or those Easterns of whom Julius Firmicus speaks 
 (Lib. de Errore prof. Relig.), who consecrated to 
 the Goddess of Phrygia, or to Venus Urania, cer- 
 tain priests, who dressed as women, who affected 
 an effeminate countenance, who painted their faces, 
 and disguised their true sex under garments bor- 
 rowed from the sex which they wished to counter- 
 feit." 
 
 The instance, just quoted, of the Enarees among 
 the Scythians, who by excessive riding were often 
 rendered impotent and effeminate, is very curiously 
 paralleled in quite another part of the world by 
 the so-called mujerados (or feminised men) among 
 the Pueblo-Indians of Mexico. Dr. W. A. Ham- 
 mond, who was stationed, in 1850, as military 
 doctor, in New Mexico, reported* that in each 
 village one of the strongest men, being chosen, 
 was compelled by unintermitted riding to pass 
 through this kind of metamorphosis. "He then 
 became indispensable for the religious orgies which 
 were celebrated among the Pueblo-Indians in the 
 
 *Wm. A. Hammond in American Journal of Neurology and Psy- 
 chiatry (August, 1882), p. 339. 
 
 25 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 same way as they once were among the old Greeks, 
 Egyptians, and other people. . . . These Saturnalia 
 take place among the Pueblos in the Spring of 
 every year, and are kept with the greatest secrecy 
 from the observation of non-Indians."t And again, 
 "To be a mujerado is no disgrace to a Pueblo-Indian. 
 On the contrary, he enjoys the protection of his 
 tribes-people, and is accorded a certain amount 
 of honour." 
 
 Similar customs to those of the American Indians 
 were found among the Pacific islanders. Captain 
 James Wilson,* in visiting the South Sea Islands 
 in 1796-8, found there men who were dressed like 
 women and enjoyed a certain honour; and 
 expresses his surprise at finding that "even their 
 women do not despise these fellows, but form 
 friendships with them." While William Ellis, also 
 a Missionary, in his Polynesian Researches ,% (vol. i., 
 p. 340), says that they not only enjoyed the sanction 
 of the priests, but even the direct example of one 
 of their divinities. He goes on to say that when 
 he asked the natives why they made away with so 
 many more female than male children, "they gener- 
 ally answered that the fisheries, the service of the 
 
 tSee Dr. Karsch, Jahrbuch Sex. Zvrisch, vol. Hi., p. 142. 
 
 *First Missionary Voyage to the South Sea Islands (London, 1799)1 
 p. 200. 
 
 £2 vols. (London, 1S29). 
 26 
 
\ 
 
 AS PROPHET OR PRIEST 
 
 temple and especially war were the only purposes 
 for which they thought it desirable to rear chil- 
 dren!" 
 
 But one of the most interesting examples of the 
 connection we are studying is that of Apollo with 
 the temple at Delphi. Delphi, of course, was one 
 of the chief seats of prophecy and divination in 
 the old world, and Apollo, who presided at this 
 shrine, was a strange blend of masculine and 
 feminine attributes. It will be remembered that he 
 was frequently represented as being very feminine 
 in form — especially in the more archaic statues. 
 He was the patron of song and music. He was 
 also, in some ways, the representative divinity of 
 the Uranian love, for he was the special god of 
 the Dorian Greeks, among whom comradeship 
 became an institution.* It was said of him that to 
 expiate his pollution by the blood of the Python 
 (whom he slew), he became the slave and devoted 
 favorite of Admetus; and Miillerf describes a 
 Dorian religious festival, in which a boy, taking the 
 part of Apollo, "probably imitated the manner in 
 which the god, as herdsman and slave of Alcestis, 
 submitted to the most degrading service." Alcestis, 
 in fact, the wife of Admetus, said of Apollo (in a 
 
 *See chapters v., vi., and vii. in this vol. 
 
 ^History and Antiquities of the Doric Race, vol. i., p. 338. 
 
 27 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 verse of Sophocles cited by Plutarch) : oiVfc S&Xe/crwp 
 ainov fat irpds " nvXyv"- When we consider that 
 Apollo, as Sun god, corresponds in some points to 
 the Syrian Baal (masculine), and that in his epithet 
 Karneios, used among the Dorians,* he corre- 
 sponds to the Syrian Ashtaroth Karnaim (feminine), 
 we seem to see a possible clue connecting certain 
 passages in the Bible — which refer to the rites of 
 the Syrian tribes and their occasional adoption in 
 the Jewish Temple*— with some phases of the Dorian 
 religious ritual. 
 
 "The Hebrews entering Syria," says Richard 
 Burton, t "found it religionised by Assyria and 
 Babylonia, when the Accadian Ishtar had passed 
 West, and had become Ashtoreth, Ashtaroth, or 
 Ashirah, the Anaitis of Armenia, the Phoenician 
 Astarte, and the Greek Aphrodite, the great Moon- 
 goddess who is queen of Heaven and Love. . . . 
 She was worshipped by men habited as women, 
 and vice versa;* for which reason, in the Torah 
 (Deut. xxii. 5), the sexes are forbidden to change 
 dress." 
 
 In the account of the reforming zeal of King 
 Josiah (2 Kings xxiii.) we are told (v. 4) that "the 
 King commanded Hilkiah, the high priest, and the 
 
 •See infra, ch. viii., p. 12. 
 
 tThe Thousand Nights and a Night (1886), vol. x., p. 229. 
 28 
 
AS PROPHET OR PRIEST 
 
 priests of the second order, and the keepers of the 
 door, to bring forth out of the temple of the Lord 
 all the vessels that were made for Baal, and for 
 the grove, and for all the host of heaven; and he 
 burned them without Jerusalem in the fields of 
 Kidron. . . . And he brake down the houses of 
 the sodomites, that were by the house of the Lord, 
 where the women wove hangings for the grove." 
 
 The word here translated "sodomites" is the 
 Hebrew word Kedeshim, meaning the "consecrated 
 ones" (males), and it occurs again in i Kings xiv. 
 24; xv. 12; and xxii. 46. And the word translated 
 "grove" is Asherah. There is some doubt, I 
 believe, as to the exact function of these Kedeshim 
 in the temple ritual, and some doubt as to whether 
 the translation of the word given in our Authorised 
 Version is justified.* It is clear, however, that these 
 men corresponded in some way to the Kedeshoth 
 or sacred women, who were — like the Devadasis 
 of the Hindu temples — a kind of courtesan or pros- 
 titute dedicated to the god, and strange as it may 
 seem to the modern mind, it is probable that they 
 united some kind of sexual service with prophetic 
 functions. Dr. Frazer, speaking t of the sacred 
 slaves or Kedeshim in various parts of Syria, con- 
 
 *See Frazer's Adonis, Altis and Osiris (and edition, 1907), pp. 14, 
 64 note, etc. 
 Ubid., p. 67. 
 
 29 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 eludes that "originally no sharp line of distinction 
 existed between the prophets and the Kedeshim; 
 both were 'men of God,' as the prophets were con- 
 stantly called; in other words they were inspired 
 mediums, men in whom the god manifested himself 
 from time to time by word and deed, in short, tem- 
 porary incarnations of the deity. But while the 
 prophets roved freely about the country, the Kede- 
 shim appears to have been regularly attached to a 
 sanctuary, and among the duties which they per- 
 formed at the shrines there were clearly some 
 which revolted the conscience of men imbued with 
 a purer morality." 
 
 As to the Asherah, or sometimes plural Asherim, 
 translated "grove," — for which the women wove 
 hangings — the most generally accepted opinion is 
 that it was a wooden post or tree stripped of its 
 branches and planted in the ground beside an 
 altar, whether of Jehovah or other gods.t Several 
 biblical passages, like Jeremiah ii. 27, suggest that 
 it was an emblem of Baal or of the male organ, 
 and others {e.g., Judges ii. 13, and iii. 7) connect it 
 with Ashtoreth, the female partner of Baal; while 
 the weaving of hangings or garments for the 
 "grove" suggests the combination of female with 
 male in one effigy.* At any rate we may conclude 
 
 tSee Frazer's Adonis, p. 14, note, etc. 
 
 *See a full consideration of this subject in Ancient Pagan and 
 Modern Christian Symbolism, by Thomas Inman (znd edition, 1874), 
 p. 120 et seq. Also a long article by A. E. Whatham in The Ameri- 
 can Journal of Religious Psychology and Education, for July, 1911, 
 on "The Sign of the Mother-goddess." 
 .10 
 
AS PROPHET OR PRIEST 
 
 pretty safely that the thing or things had a strongly 
 sexual signification. 
 
 Thus it would seem that in the religious worship 
 of the Canaanites there were male courtesans 
 attached to the temples and inhabiting their pre- 
 cincts, as well as consecrated females, and that the 
 ceremonies connected with these cults were of a 
 markedly sexual character. These ceremonies had 
 probably originated in an ancient worship of sexual 
 acts as being symbolical of, and therefore favorable 
 to, the fertility of Nature and the crops. But 
 though they had penetrated into the Jewish temple 
 they were detested by the more zealous adherents 
 of Jehovah, because — for one reason at any rate — 
 they belonged to the rival cult of the Syrian Baal 
 and Ashtoreth, the Kedeshim in fact being "con- 
 secrated to the Mother of the Gods, the famous 
 Dea Syria." t And they were detestable, too, 
 because they "went hand in hand with the culti- 
 vation of 'familiar spirits' and 'wizards' — who of 
 course knew nothing of Jehovah I Thus we see 
 (2 Kings xxi.) that Manasseh followed the abomina- 
 tions of the heathen, building up the high places 
 and the 'groves' and the altars for Baal. "And 
 he made his son pass through the fire, and observed 
 times, and used enchantments, % and dealt with 
 
 tSee Westermarck's Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, 
 vol. ii., p. 488. 
 
 J All this suggests the practice of some early and primitive science, 
 and much resembles the accusations made in the thirteenth century 
 against our Roger Bacon, pioneer of modern science. 
 
 31 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 familiar spirits and wizards, and wrought much 
 wickedness. . . . and he set a graven image of 
 the 'grove' in the house of the Lord." But Josiah, 
 his grandson, reversed all this, and drove the 
 familiar spirits and the wizards out of the land, 
 together with the Kedeshim. 
 
 So far with regard to Syria and the Bible. But 
 Dr. Frazer points out the curious likeness here to 
 customs existing to-day among the Negroes of the 
 Slave Coast of West Africa. In that region, women, 
 called Kosio, are attached to the temples as wives, 
 priestesses and temple prostitutes of the python- 
 god. But besides these "there are male Kosio as 
 well as female Kosio, that is there are dedicated 
 men as well as dedicated women, priests as well as 
 priestesses, and the ideas and customs in regard 
 to them seem to be similar.* "Indeed," he says, 
 "the points of resemblance between the prophets of 
 Israel and of West Africa are close and curious." t 
 It must be said, however, that Dr. Frazer does 
 not in either case insist on the inference of homo- 
 sexuality. On the contrary, he rather endeavours 
 to avoid it, and of course it would be unreason- 
 able to suppose any invariable connection of these 
 "sacred men" with this peculiarity. At the same 
 time the general inference in that direction is 
 strong and difficult to evade. 
 
 *Adonis, etc., p. 60. 
 Ilbid., p. 66. 
 
 32 
 
AS PROPHET OR PRIEST 
 
 Throughout China and Japan and much of 
 Malaysia, the so-called Bonzes, or Buddhist priests, 
 have youths or boys attached to the service of 
 the temples. Each priest educates a novice to 
 follow him in the ritual, and it is said that the 
 relations between the two are often physically inti- 
 mate. Francis Xavier, in his letters from Japan 
 (in 1549), mentions this. He says that the Bonzes 
 themselves allowed that this was so, but main- 
 tained that it was no sin. They said that inter- 
 course with woman was for them a deadly sin, 
 or even punishable with death; but that the other 
 relation was, in their eyes, by no means execrable, 
 but harmless and even commendable.* And, as 
 it was then, so on the whole it appears to be now, 
 or to have been till very lately. In all the Buddhist 
 sects in Japan (except Shinto) celibacy is imposed 
 on the priests, but homosexual relations are not 
 forbidden. 
 
 And to return to the New World, we find Cieza 
 de Leon — who is generally considered a trustworthy 
 authority — describing practices and ceremonials in 
 the temples of New Granada in his time (1550) 
 strangely similar to those referred to in the Hebrew 
 
 •See T. Karsch-Haack, Forschungen iiber gleichgeschlechtliche 
 Liebe (Munich), Die Japaner, p. 77. Also The Letters of Fr. Xavier, 
 translated into German by Joseph Burg (3 vols., 1836-40). 
 
 33 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 Bible: — "Every temple or chief house of worship 
 keeps one or two men, or more, according to the 
 idol — who go about attired like women, even from 
 their childhood, and talk like women, and imitate 
 them in their manner, carriage, and all else." t 
 These served in the temples, and were made use 
 of "almost as if by way of sanctity and religion" 
 {cast come por via de s ami dad y religion) ; and he 
 concludes that "the Devil had gained such mastery 
 in that land that, not content with causing the 
 people to fall into mortal sin, he had actually 
 persuaded them that the same was a species of 
 holiness and religion, in order that by so doing 
 he might render them all the more subject to him. 
 And this (he says) Fray Domingo told me in his 
 own writing — a man of whom everyone knows 
 what a lover of truth he is." 
 
 Thus, as Richard Burton remarks,* these same 
 usages in connection with religion have spread 
 nearly all over the world and "been adopted by 
 the priestly castes from Mesopotamia to Peru." 
 
 It is all very strange and difficult to understand. 
 Indeed, if the facts were not so well-established and 
 so overwhelmingly numerous, it would appear in- 
 credible to most of us nowadays that the conception 
 
 tSee La Chronica del Peru, by Cieza de Leon (Antwerp, 1554), 
 ch. 64. 
 *Op. cit., p. 243. 
 
 34 
 
AS PROPHET OR PRIEST 
 
 of "sacredness" or "consecration" could be hon- 
 estly connected, in the mind of any people, with 
 the above things and persons. And yet it is 
 obvious, when one sums up the whole matter, that 
 though in cases Cieza de Leon may have been right 
 in suggesting that religion was only brought in 
 as a cloak and excuse for licentiousness, yet in the 
 main this explanation does not suffice. There must 
 have been considerably more at the back of it all 
 than that: a strange conviction apparently, or 
 superstition, if one likes to call it so, that unusual 
 powers of divination and prophecy were to be 
 found in homosexual folk, and those who adopted 
 the said hybrid kind of life — a conviction moreover 
 (or superstition) so rooted and persistent that it 
 spread over the greater part of the world. 
 
 Is any explanation, we may ask, of this strange 
 and anomalous belief possible? Probably a com- 
 plete explanation, in the present state of our knowl- 
 edge, is not possible. Yet some suggestions in 
 that direction we may perhaps venture to give. 
 Before doing so, however, it may be as well to 
 dwell for a moment on the further and widely 
 prevalent belief in the connection between homo- 
 sexuality and sorcery. 
 
 35 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 AS WIZARD OR WITCH 
 
 Perhaps — as it is now generally considered that 
 the belief in Magic preceded what we call religion, 
 and that the wizard came in order of development 
 before the priest — I ought to have placed the 
 present chapter first; but for some reasons the 
 order adopted seems the better. Anyhow it is 
 certain that among primitive folk the prophet, the 
 priest, the wizard, and the witch-doctor largely unite 
 their functions, and are not easily distinguishable 
 from one another; and therefore, from what has 
 already been said, we may naturally expect to 
 find an association between homosexuality and 
 sorcery. 
 
 Westermarck (vol. i., p. 477) mentions the ancient 
 Scandinavians as regarding passive homosexuals 
 in the light of sorcerers; and refers (p. 484 note) to 
 Thomas Falkner, who, in his Description of Pata- 
 gonia (1775), p. 117, says that among the Pata- 
 gonians "the wizards are of both sexes. The 
 36 
 
AS WIZARD OR WITCH 
 
 male wizards are obliged (as it were) to leave their 
 sex, and to dress themselves in female apparel, 
 and are not permitted to marry, though the female 
 ones or witches may. They are generally chosen 
 for this office when they are children, and a prefer- 
 ence is always shown to those who at that early 
 time of life discover an effeminate disposition. 
 They are clothed very early in female attire, and 
 presented with the drum and rattles belonging to 
 the profession they are to follow." 
 
 The following is an account given by Dawydow, 
 the Russian traveller,* of the quite similar custom 
 prevalent in his time (about 1800) among the 
 Konyagas in the Alaska region: — "There are here 
 (in the island of Kadiak) men with tatooed chins, 
 who work only as women, who always live with 
 the women-kind, and like the latter, have husbands 
 — not infrequently even two. Such men are called 
 Achnutschik. They are not by any means despised, 
 but, on the contrary, are respected in the settle- 
 ments, and are for the most part wizards. The 
 Konyaga, who possesses an Achnutschik instead of 
 a wife, is even thought fortunate. When father 
 or mother regard their son as feminine in his bear- 
 ing they will often dedicate him in earliest child- 
 hood to the vocation of Achnutschik. Sometimes 
 
 •See Vranismus bet den Naturwlkern, Dr. F. Karsch, in "Jahr- 
 buch fur Sexuellen Zwischenstufen," vol. Hi., pp. 161, 162. 
 
 37 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 it will happen that the parents have in mind before- 
 hand to have a daughter, and when they find them- 
 selves disappointed they make their new-born son 
 an Achnutschik." 
 
 Here we have the association between homo- 
 sexuality and sorcery clearly indicated for the very 
 extremes, South and North, of the American con- 
 tinent; and, as a matter of fact, and as appears 
 from various other passages in the present work, 
 the same association may be traced among count- 
 less tribes of the middle regions of the same conti- 
 nent, and all over the world. There was a legend 
 current among the North American Indians at 
 one time* about a Bardache, or man of this kind, 
 who was shot at by an enraged warrior of his 
 own tribe; but when the onlookers ran to the place 
 where the transfixed man fell they found only an 
 arrow sticking in a heap of stones. The man 
 had disappeared! 
 
 With regard to the attribution of homosexuality 
 also to female wizards, or witches, I believe that, 
 rightly or wrongly, this was very common in Europe 
 a few centuries ago. Leo Africanus (1492) in his 
 description of Morocco t says, "The third kind of 
 diviners are women-witches, which are affirmed to 
 
 *See Maxn. Prinz zu Wied, Reise in das innere N. America (2 
 vols., 1839 and 1841), vol. ii., p. 133. 
 IHakluyt Society (3 vols.), vol. ii. ( p. 458. 
 
 38 
 
AS WIZARD OR WITCH 
 
 have familiarity with divels. Changing their voices 
 they fain the divell to speak within them: then they 
 which come to enquire ought with greate feare 
 and trembling (to) aske these vile and abominable 
 witches such questions as they mean to propound, 
 and lastly, offering some fee unto the divell, they 
 depart. But the wiser and honester sort of people 
 call these women Sahacat, which in Latin signifieth 
 Frkatrices, because they have a damnable custom 
 to commit unlawful venerie among themselves, 
 which I cannot express in any modester terms." 
 He then goes on to say that these witches, carnally 
 desiring some of the young women who come to 
 "enquire," entrap them and corrupt them so far 
 as actually to cause them in some cases to "desire 
 the companie of those witches" (and to that end, he 
 explains, deceive their husbands). Whether this 
 is all true or not — and probably it is quite vulgarly 
 exaggerated — it shows the kind of thing that was 
 believed at that time about witches. 
 
 In some cases the adoption of the life of priest 
 or sorcerer is accompanied by a change of dress 
 (as we have seen), but this is by no means always 
 so. Speaking of the Pelew Islanders, Dr. Frazer* 
 attributes the adoption by the priests of female 
 attire to the fact that "it often happens that a 
 goddess chooses a man, not a woman, for her 
 *Adonis, etc., p. 428. 
 
 39 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 minister and inspired mouthpiece. When that is 
 so, the favoured man is thenceforth regarded and 
 treated as a woman." And he continues — "This 
 pretended change of sex under the inspiration of 
 a female spirit perhaps explains a custom widely 
 spread among savages, in accordance with which 
 some men dress as women and act as women 
 through life." 
 
 This explanation is certainly not very convincing 
 — though it is just possible that in certain cases of 
 men of this kind in early times, the feminine part 
 of their natures may have personified itself, and 
 presented itself to them as a vision of a female 
 spirit or goddess; and thus the explanation might 
 be justified. But anyhow it should not be over- 
 looked that the same impulse (for men to dress as 
 women, and women to dress as men) perseveres 
 to-day in quite a large percentage of our modern 
 civilised populations; and whatever its explana- 
 tions, the impulse is often enormously powerful, 
 and its satisfaction a source of great delight. It 
 must also not be overlooked, in dealing with this 
 complex and difficult subject, that the mere fact 
 of a person delighting to adopt the garb of the op- 
 posite sex does not in itself prove that his or her 
 love-tendency is abnormal — i.e., cross-dressing does 
 not prove homosexuality. There are not a few 
 cases of men in the present day (and presumably 
 40 
 
AS WIZARD OR WITCH 
 
 the same in past times) who love to dress as women, 
 and yet are perfectly normal in their sex-relations; 
 and therefore too sweeping generalisations on this 
 subject must be avoided.* 
 
 On the whole, however, cross-dressing must be 
 taken as a general indication of, and a cognate 
 phenomenon to, homosexuality; and its wide preva- 
 lence in early times, especially in connection with 
 the priesthood, must give us much matter for 
 thought. Dr. Frazer, in his Adonis, Attis, and 
 Osiris, continuing the passage I have just quoted, 
 says: — "These unsexed creatures often, perhaps 
 generally, profess the arts of sorcery and healing, 
 they communicate with spirits and are regarded 
 sometimes with awe and sometimes with contempt, 
 as beings of a higher or lower order than common 
 folk. Often they are dedicated or trained to their 
 vocation from childhood. Effeminate sorcerers or 
 priests of this sort are found among the Sea Dyaks 
 of Borneo, the Bugis of South Celebes, the Pata- 
 gonians of South America. ... In Madagascar 
 we hear of effeminate men who wore female attire 
 and acted as women, thinking thereby to do God 
 service. In the kingdom of Congo there was a 
 sacrificial priest who commonly dressed as a 
 woman and gloried in the title of the grandmother." 
 
 *See, in these connections, Dr. Hirschfeld's remarkable book Die 
 Transvestiten (Berlin, 1910) ; also Die Kontrdre Sexual-empfindunff, 
 by Dr. A. Moll (edition 1893), pp. 82-90. 
 
 41 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 And Dr. Karsch, in his Urantsmus bei den Natur: 
 volkern, after enumerating the above and many 
 other instances, says that among many or most of 
 these tribes the main object of the cross-dressing 
 seems to be something of a religious or mystical 
 character, since the persons concerned are accounted 
 as beings of a higher order, priests or sorcerers; 
 but that fact does not stand in the way of the 
 homosexual relationship, which certainly prevails in 
 many cases. 
 
 An important point in all this matter, and one 
 which on the one hand gives an air of sincerity to 
 the phenomenon, and on the other may easily have 
 connected it with magic and sorcery in the primitive 
 mind, is the rapidity and decisiveness with which 
 the sexual transformation sometimes seems to take 
 place. This is indicated in Dr. Frazer's just-quoted 
 passage on the Pelew Islanders; and in such cases 
 we seem to be witnessing a veritable metamor- 
 phosis, and cannot help wondering whether a real 
 psychological or physiological transmutation may 
 not be in progress. For though sometimes, as we 
 have seen, children are brought up from an early 
 age to play this exchanged or inverted part in 
 life, yet often they take it up themselves, and 
 cannot be persuaded to abandon it; and often they 
 quite suddenly adopt it as young men (or women) 
 or in mature age — as the result of some supposed 
 42 
 
AS WIZARD OR WITCH 
 
 dream or inspiration. Wied, lately quoted, says 
 concerning the Bardaches: — "These generally as- 
 sert that a dream or some high impulse has com- 
 manded them to adopt this state as their 'medi- 
 cine' or salvation, and nothing then can turn them 
 away from their purpose. Many a father has 
 sought even by force to divert his child from this 
 object, has reasoned with him at first, offered him 
 fine weapons and masculine articles of dress in 
 order to inspire him with a taste for manly occu- 
 pations; and when this proved useless, has handled 
 him sternly, punished and beaten him; yet all in 
 vain. * 
 
 John T. Irving, in his Indian Sketches (1835) — a 
 description of the Pawnee and other American In- 
 dians — has a whole chapter (ch. xxii.) entitled 
 "The Metamorphosis" and dealing with this sub- 
 ject. He there describes how among a group of 
 female Indians occupied in drying shelled corn in 
 the sun, he one day noticed what seemed a par- 
 ticularly tall and powerful woman — who, on 
 enquiry, turned out to be a man. This man's 
 story was as follows. Once an Otoe brave of the 
 highest renown, he on one occasion, after a des- 
 perate fight with the Osages, returned home, and 
 refusing to speak to anyone, threw himself on his 
 bed for the night. In the morning he rose up an 
 
 *See Prinz zu Wied, op cit., vol. ii., p. 133. 
 
 43 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 altered man. "He collected his family round him, 
 and informed them that the Great Spirit had 
 visited him in a dream, and had told him he had 
 now reached the zenith of his reputation; that no 
 voice had more weight in the Council; no arm was 
 heavier in battle. But that he must thenceforth 
 relinquish all claim to the rank of a warrior and 
 assume the dress and avocations of a female." His 
 friends heard him in sorrow, but did not attempt 
 to dissuade him, "for they listened to the com- 
 munications of the deity with a veneration equal 
 to his own." So he snapped his bow in twain, 
 buried his tomahawk and rifle, washed off his war 
 paint, discarded the eagle plume from his scalp- 
 lock, and ceased to be numbered among the war- 
 riors, relinquishing all "for the lowly and servile 
 duties of a female." 
 
 Years had elapsed, says the author, since that 
 act of renunciation, but the man had kept to his 
 resolve. 
 
 These strange changes, induced in childhood, 
 or spontaneously adopted in youth, maturity, and 
 even old age, have been observed amongst almost 
 all the North American Indian tribes. Wied men- 
 tions the Sauks, Foxes, Mandans, Crows, Black- 
 feet, Dakotas, Assiniboins, and others. And their 
 connection with the Moon seems to be frequently 
 believed in. W. H. Keating, in his Expedition to 
 44 
 
AS WIZARD OR WITCH 
 
 Lake Winnipeck (2 vols., 1824), says that the Sun 
 among the Winnebagos is held to be propitious to 
 man; but "the Moon, on the contrary, they held 
 to be inhabited by an adverse female deity, whose 
 delight is to cross man in all his pursuits. If, dur- 
 ing their sleep, this deity should present herself 
 to them in their dreams, the Indians consider it 
 enjoined on them by duty to become cinadi; and 
 they ever after assume the female garb. It is 
 not impossible (continues Keating) that this may 
 have been the source of the numerous stories of 
 hermaphrodites related by all the old writers on 
 America." 
 
 Whatever may be the truth about the connection 
 between these strange changes of sexual habit and 
 visionary appearances of the deities (a subject 
 on which I shall touch again later on), we cannot 
 help seeing, as I say, that the fervent belief in 
 such connection is a testimony to the sincerity and 
 actuality of the transformations, as well as a par- 
 tial explanation of why sorcerous and miraculous 
 powers were credited to the transformed persons. 
 At any rate, the total mass of facts connecting 
 homosexualism in general with religion and divi- 
 nation, or with unusual psychic powers, and on 
 the same lines as those already presented in this 
 and the preceding chapter, is enormously large; and 
 we need delay no longer on their further accu- 
 
 45 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 mulation. We may, however, venture to say a few 
 words in possible explanation of the connection. 
 
 Dr. Iwan Bloch, in his monumental work, Die 
 Prostitution* leans to the general explanation that 
 homosexuality, just on account of its strange and 
 inexplicable character, was by primitive people ac- 
 counted as something divine and miraculous, and 
 the homosexual man or woman therefore credited 
 with supernatural powers. He says (vol. i., p. 101), 
 "This riddle, which despite all our efforts, present- 
 day science has not yet satisfactorily solved, must 
 to the primitive intelligence have appeared even 
 more inexplicable than to us; and a man born with 
 the inclination towards his own sex must have 
 been regarded as something extraordinary, as one 
 of those strange freaks of Nature which among 
 Primitives are so easily accounted divine marvels 
 and honored as such. The by no means scanty 
 supply of ethnological facts on this subject which 
 we possess confirms the above view, and shows in 
 what odour of sanctity homosexual individuals have 
 often stood among Nature-folk — for which reason 
 they frequently played an important part in religious 
 rituals and festivals." 
 
 Bloch also quotes a theory of Adolf Bastian, 
 who, in his great work, Der Mensch in der Ges- 
 chichte, supposes that the priests among early 
 
 ♦Berlin, 1912. 
 46 
 
AS WIZARD OR WITCH 
 
 peoples, as representatives of the bisexual principle 
 in Nature, encouraged homosexual rites in the tem- 
 ples on the same footing as heterosexual rites. "The 
 men," says Bastian, "prayed to the active pow- 
 ers of Nature, and the women, in privacy and 
 retirement, to the feminine powers; while the priests, 
 who had to satisfy the demands of both parties, 
 learned the idea of sex-changes from the Moon,, 
 and served the masculine gods in masculine attire, 
 and the goddesses in feminine garments, or set up 
 images of a bearded Venus and of a Herkules spin- 
 ning at the wheel." 
 
 Neither of these explanations seems to me to be 
 quite adequate. That of Bloch is hardly sufficient; 
 for though it is true that freaks of Nature are often 
 regarded with superstitious awe by savages, that 
 fact does not quite suffice to explain the world-wide 
 attribution of magic powers to homosexuals, nor 
 the systematic adoption of the services of such 
 folk in the temples. The theory of Bastian, on 
 the other hand, is quite opposed to that of Bloch, 
 for it pre-supposes a very wide original prevalence 
 of homosexuality in the human race, which was 
 only preserved (and not instituted) by the priests in 
 the tradition of the religious rituals; and therefore 
 it cuts away the speculation that the homosexual 
 man was divinised on account of his rarity. More- 
 over, the theory of Bastian suffers from the fact 
 
 47 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 that the supposed wide prevalence of bisexuality in 
 aboriginal times is by no means proved, or indeed 
 easily provable — although, of course, it may have 
 existed. However, on the subject of bisexuality I 
 shall touch in a later chapter. 
 
 For myself, I think that there are two quite 
 possible and not unreasonable theories on the whole 
 matter. The first and most important is that there 
 really is a connection between the homosexual tem- 
 perament and divinatory or unusual psychic pow- 
 ers; the second is (that there is no such par- 
 ticular connection, but) that the idea of sorcery or 
 witchcraft naturally and commonly springs up 
 round the ceremonials of an old religion or morality 
 when that religion is being superseded by a new 
 one. This is, of course, a well-recognised fact. 
 The gods of one religion become the devils of its 
 successor; the poetic rites of one age become the 
 black magic of the next. But in the case of the 
 primitive religions of the earth their ceremonials 
 were, without doubt, very largely sexual, and even 
 homosexual. Consequently, when new religious de- 
 velopments set in, the homosexual rites, which were 
 most foreign to the later religionists and most dis- 
 turbing to their ideas, associated themselves most 
 strongly with the notion of sorcery and occult 
 powers. 
 
 For myself I am inclined to accept both explana- 
 48 
 
AS WIZARD OR WITCH 
 
 tions, and — leaving out, of course, the clause in 
 brackets in the second — to combine them. I think 
 there is an organic connection between the homo- 
 sexual temperament and unusual psychic or divi- 
 natory powers; but I think also that the causes 
 mentioned in the second explanation have in many 
 cases led to an exaggerated belief in such connec- 
 tion, and have given it a sorcerous or demonic as- 
 pect. 
 
 To take the second point first. Just as, according 
 to Darwin, the sharpest rivalry occurs between a 
 species and the closely allied species from which it 
 has sprung, so in any religion there is the fiercest 
 theological hatred against the form which has im- 
 mediately preceded it. Early Christianity could 
 never say enough against the Pagan cults of the 
 old world (partly for the very reason that it em- 
 bodied so much of their ceremonial and was in 
 many respects their lineal descendant). They were 
 the work and inspiration of the devil. Their 
 Eucharists and baptismal rites and initiations — so 
 strangely and diabolically similar to the Christian 
 rites — were sheer black magic; their belief in the 
 sacredness of sex mere filthiness. Similarly the 
 early Protestants could never say malignant things 
 enough against the Roman Catholics; or the Secu- 
 larists in their turn against the Protestants. In all 
 these cases there is an element of fear — fear because 
 
 49 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 the thing supposed to have been left behind lies 
 after all so close, and is always waiting to reassert 
 itself — and this fear invests the hated symbol or 
 person with a halo of devilish potency. Think, for 
 instance, what sinister and magical powers and in- 
 fluence have been commonly ascribed to the Roman 
 Catholic priests in the ordinary Protestant parlours 
 and circles I 
 
 It is easy, therefore, to understand that when the 
 Jews established their worship of Jehovah as a 
 great reaction against the primitive nature-cults 
 of Syria — and in that way to become in time the 
 germ of Christianity — the first thing they did was 
 to denounce the priests and satellites of Baal-Peor 
 and Ashtoreth as wizards and sorcerers, and 
 wielders of devilish faculties. These cults were 
 frankly sexual — probably the most intimate mean- 
 ing of them, as religions, being the glory and 
 sacredness of sex; but the Jews (like the later 
 Christians) blinding themselves to this aspect, were 
 constrained to see in sex only filthiness, and in its 
 religious devotees persons in league with Beelzebub 
 and the powers of darkness. And, of course, the 
 homosexual elements in these cults, being the most 
 foreign to the new religion, stood out as the most 
 sorcerous and the most magical part of them. 
 Westermarck points out ("Moral Ideas," ii. 489) 
 that the Mediaeval Christianity constantly associated 
 
 50 
 
AS WIZARD OR WITCH 
 
 homosexuality with heresy — to such a degree in fact 
 that the French word herite or heretique was some- 
 times used in both connections; and that bougre 
 or Bulgarian was commonly used in both, though 
 to begin with it only denoted a sect of religious 
 heretics who came from Bulgaria. And he thinks 
 that the violent reprobation and punishment of homo- 
 sexuality arose more from its connection in the gen- 
 eral mind with heresy than from direct aversion in 
 the matter — more in fact from religious motives than 
 from secular ones. 
 
 But connecting with all this, we must not neglect 
 the theory so ably worked out by Prof. Karl Pear- 
 son among others — namely that the primitive 
 religions were not only sexual in character but 
 that they were largely founded on an early matri- 
 archal order of society, in which women had the 
 predominant sway — descent being traced through 
 them, and tribal affairs largely managed by them, 
 and in which the chief deities were goddesses, and 
 the priests and prophets mainly females. Exactly 
 how far such an order of society really extended 
 in the past is apparently a doubtful question; but 
 that there are distinct traces of such matriarchal 
 institutions in certain localities and among some 
 peoples seems to be quite established. Karl Pear- 
 son, assuming the real prevalence of these institu- 
 tions in early times points out, reasonably enough, 
 
 51 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 that when Christianity became fairly established 
 matriarchal rites and festivals, lingering on in out- 
 of-the-way places and among the peasantry, would 
 at once be interpreted as being devilish and sor- 
 cerous in character, and the women (formerly 
 priestesses) who conducted them and perhaps re- 
 cited snatches of ancient half-forgotten rituals, 
 would be accounted witches. "We have, there- 
 fore," he says,* "to look upon the witch as essen- 
 tially the degraded form of the old priestess, cun- 
 ning in the knowledge of herbs and medicine, 
 jealous of the rites of the goddess she serves, and 
 preserving in spells and incantations such wisdom 
 as early civilisation possessed." This civilisation, 
 he explains, included the "observing of times and 
 seasons," the knowledge of weather-lore, the inven- 
 tion of the broom, the distaff, the cauldron, the 
 pitchfork, the domestication of the goat, the pig, 
 the cock and the hen, and so forth — all which things 
 became symbols of the witch in later times, simply 
 because originally they were the inventions of 
 woman and the insignia of her office, and so the 
 religious symbols of the Mother-goddess and her 
 cult. 
 
 The connection of all this with homosexual cus- 
 toms is not at once clear; but it has been suggested 
 
 'The Chances of Death and other studies, by Karl Pearson (a vols., 
 1897), vol. ii., p. 13. 
 
 52 
 
AS WIZARD OR WITCH 
 
 — though I am not sure that Karl Pearson himself 
 supports this — that the primitive religions of the 
 Matriarchate may have ultimately led to men-priests 
 dressing in female attire. For when the matri- 
 archal days were passing away, and men were 
 beginning to assert their predominance, it still may 
 have happened that the old religious customs lin- 
 gering on may have induced men to simulate 
 the part of women and to dress as priestesses, or 
 at least have afforded them an excuse for so 
 doing, t In this way it seems just possible that the 
 pendulum-swing of society from the matriarchate 
 to the patriarchate may have been accompanied 
 by some degree of crasis and confusion between the 
 functions of the sexes, homosexual customs and ten- 
 dencies may have come to the fore, and the connec- 
 tion of homosexuality with the priesthood may seem 
 to be accounted for. 
 
 This explanation, however, though it certainly 
 has a claim to be mentioned, seems to me too 
 risky and insecure for very much stress to be laid 
 upon it. In the first place the extent and preva- 
 lence of the matriarchal order of society is a mat- 
 ter still very much disputed, and to assume that 
 at any early period of human history the same was 
 practically universal would be unjustified. In the 
 second place, granting the existence of the matri- 
 
 tSee above, pp. 25 and 32, etc. 
 
 53 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 archal order and its transmutation into the patri- 
 archal, the connection of this change with the de- 
 velopment of homosexual customs is still only a 
 speculation and a theory, supported by little direct 
 evidence. On the other hand, the facts to be ex- 
 plained — namely, the connection of homosexuality 
 with priesthood and divination — seem to be world- 
 wide and universal. Therefore, though we admit 
 that the causes mentioned — namely the attribution 
 of magical qualities to old religious rites, and the 
 introduction of feminine inversions and disguises 
 through the old matriarchal ' custom — may account 
 in part for the facts, and in particular may in cer- 
 tain localities have given them a devilish or sor- 
 cerous complexion, yet I think we must look deeper 
 for the root-explanations of the whole matter, and 
 consider whether there may not be some fundamen- 
 tal causes in human nature itself. 
 
 54 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 AS INVENTORS OF THE ARTS AND CRAFTS 
 
 I have already said that I think there is an original 
 connection of some kind between homosexuality 
 and divination; but in saying this, of course, I do 
 not mean that everywhere and always the one is 
 associated with the other, or that the relationship 
 between the two is extremely well marked; but I 
 contend that a connection can be traced and that on 
 a priori grounds its existence is quite probable. 
 
 And first, with regard to actual observation of 
 such a connection, the fact of the widespread belief 
 in it, which I have already noted as existing among 
 the primitive tribes of the earth, and their found- 
 ing of all sorts of customs on that belief, must 
 count for something. Certainly the mere existence 
 of a widespread belief among early and supersti- 
 tious peoples — as for instance that an eclipse is 
 caused by a dragon swallowing the sun — does not 
 prove its truth; but in the case we are considering 
 the matter is well within the range of ordinary 
 
 55 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 observation, and the constant connection between 
 the choupan and the angakok, the ke'yev and the 
 shaman, the berdashe and the witch-doctor, the 
 ganymede and the temple-priest, and their corre- 
 spondences all over the world, the basir among the 
 Dyaks, the boy-priests in the temples of Peru, the 
 same in the Buddhist temples of Ceylon, Burma and 
 China — all these cases seem to point to some under- 
 lying fact, of the fitness or adaptation of the invert 
 for priestly or divinatory functions. And though 
 the tendency already alluded to, of a later religion 
 to ascribe devilish potency to earlier cults, must 
 certainly in many instances shed a sinister or sor- 
 cerous glamour over the invert, yet this exaggera- 
 tion need not blind us to the existence of a residual 
 fact behind it; and anyhow to a great many of the 
 cases just mentioned it does not apply at all, since 
 in them the question of one religion superseding 
 another does not enter. 
 
 To come to more recent times, the frequency 
 with which accusations of homosexuality have been 
 launched against the religious orders and monks 
 of the Catholic Church, the Knights Templars, and 
 even the ordinary priests and clerics, must give 
 us pause. Nor need we overlook the fact that in 
 Protestant Britain the curate and the parson quite 
 often appear to belong to some "third sex" which 
 is neither wholly masculine nor wholly feminine I 
 56 
 
AS INVENTORS OF THE ARTS AND CRAFTS 
 
 Granting, then, that the connection in question 
 is to a certain degree indicated by the anthropo- 
 logical facts which we already possess — is there, 
 we may ask, any rational ground for expecting this 
 connection a priori and from psychological con- 
 siderations ? I think there is. 
 
 In the first place all science now compels us 
 to admit the existence of the homosexual tempera- 
 ment as a fact of human nature, and an important 
 fact; and not only so, but to perceive that it is 
 widely spread among the various races of the earth, 
 and extends back to the earliest times of which we 
 have anything like historical knowledge. We can 
 no longer treat it as a mere local and negligible 
 freak, or put it in the category of a sinful and 
 criminal disposition to be stamped out at all costs. 
 We feel that it must have some real significance. 
 The question is what that may be. The following 
 is a suggestion that may cover part of the ground, 
 though not, I think, the whole. 
 
 In the primitive societies the men (the quite 
 normal men) are the warriors and hunters. These 
 are their exclusive occupations. The women (the 
 normal women) attend to domestic work and agri- 
 culture, and their days are consumed in those la- 
 bors. But in the evolution of society there are 
 many more functions to be represented than those 
 simple ones just mentioned. And we may almost 
 
 57 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 think that if it had not been for the emergence of 
 intermediate types — the more or less feminine man 
 and similarly the more or less masculine woman 
 — social life might never have advanced beyond 
 these primitive phases. But when the man came 
 along who did not want to fight-— who perhaps was 
 more inclined to run away — and who did not 
 particularly care about hunting, he necessarily dis- 
 covered some other interest and occupation — com- 
 posing songs or observing the qualities of herbs or 
 the processions of the stars. Similarly with the 
 woman who did not care about house-work and 
 child-rearing. The non-warlike men and the non- 
 domestic women, in short, sought new outlets for 
 their energies. They sought different occupations 
 from those of the quite ordinary man and woman 
 — as in fact they do to-day; and so they became 
 the initiators of new activities. They became stu- 
 dents of life and nature, inventors and teach- 
 ers of arts and crafts, or wizards (as they 
 would be considered) and sorcerers; they became 
 diviners and seers, or revealers of the gods and 
 religion; they became medicine-men and healers, 
 prophets and prophetesses; and so ultimately laid 
 the foundation of the priesthood, and of science, 
 literature and art. Thus — on this view, and as 
 might not unreasonably be expected — it was pri- 
 marily a variation in the intimate sex-nature of 
 58 
 
AS INVENTORS OF THE ARTS AND CRAFTS 
 
 the human being which led to these important 
 differentiations in his social life and external 
 activities. 
 
 In various ways we can see the likelihood of 
 this thesis, and the probability of the intermediate 
 man or woman becoming a forward force in human 
 evolution. In the first place, as just mentioned, not 
 wholly belonging to either of the two great progeni- 
 tive branches of the human race, his nature would 
 not find complete satisfaction in the activities of 
 either branch, and he would necessarily create a 
 new sphere of some kind for himself. Secondly, 
 finding himself different from the great majority, 
 sought after by some and despised by others, now 
 an object of contumely and now an object of love 
 and admiration, he would be forced to think. His 
 mind turned inwards on himself would be forced 
 to tackle the problem of his own nature, and aft- 
 erwards the problem of the world and of outer 
 nature. He would become one of the first thinkers, 
 dreamers, discoverers. Thirdly, some of the Inter- 
 mediates (though certainly not all) combining the 
 emotionality of the feminine with the practicality 
 of the masculine, and many other qualities and 
 powers of both sexes, as well as much of their ex- 
 perience, would undoubtedly be greatly superior in 
 ability to the rest of their tribe, and making for- 
 ward progress in the world of thought and imagina- 
 
 59 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 tion would become inventors, teachers, musicians, 
 medicine-men and priests; while their early science 
 and art (for such it would be) — prediction of rain, 
 determination of seasons, observation of stars, study 
 of herbs, creation of chants and songs, rude draw- 
 ings, and so forth — would be accounted quite magical 
 and divinatory. 
 
 With regard to the early beginnings of poetry 
 and music, we know that dancing had an impor- 
 tant place; and there is an interesting passage in 
 Leguevel de Lacombe's Voyage a Madagascar* (vol. 
 i., pp. 97, 98), which indicates the connection 
 of these arts, among the Tsecats of Madagascar, 
 with sexual variation. "Dancers form a distinct 
 class in Madagascar, though they are not very 
 numerous. They have their own manners and cus- 
 toms, and live apart; they do not marry, and even 
 affect dislike for women — although they wear the 
 dress of the latter and imitate their voice, ges- 
 tures, and general habits. They wear large ear- 
 rings of gold or silver, necklaces of coral or col- 
 oured beads, and bracelets of silver; they care- 
 fully extract the hair of their beards, and in short 
 play the part of women so well that one is often 
 deceived. For the rest these dancers have simple 
 manners, and are very sober in their habits; they 
 are continually on the move, and are well accepted 
 
 *2 vols. (Paris, 1840). 
 60 
 
AS INVENTORS OF THE ARTS AND CRAFTS 
 
 wherever they go; sometimes, indeed, they receive 
 considerable presents. I have seen chiefs who have 
 been amused by them for some days make them a 
 present, on their departure, of two or three slaves. 
 They are the poets or the bards of the island, and 
 they improvise rhapsodies in praise of those who 
 are generous to them." 
 
 Very similar customs connecting the wandering 
 life of dancers, actors, and singers with a certain 
 amount of inversion of temperament, are known to 
 have existed among that strange and remarkable 
 people, the Areoi of Polynesia: of whom Wm. Ellis, 
 the missionary already quoted, says that they were 
 honoured as gods, and were supposed to be inspired 
 by the gods to become members of the Areoi so- 
 ciety; also that their initiations began by submis- 
 sion to service and to various ordeals, and ended 
 by a ceremonial in which the candidate snatched and 
 appropriated the cloth worn by the chief woman 
 present ! 
 
 In all this — whether relating to primitive science 
 or primitive art — there would, of course, really be 
 nothing miraculous. It is easy to see that certain 
 individuals, whose interests or abilities were turned 
 in special or unusual directions, would seem to the 
 general herd as having supernatural intuitions or 
 powers. The "rain-maker's" predictions in South 
 Africa to-day may date from no more weather- 
 
 61 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 lore than those of a British farmer; but to his 
 tribe he appears a magician. Magic and early 
 science have almost everywhere been interchange- 
 able terms. The intermediate or Uranian man, from 
 this point of view, would be simply an ordinary 
 member of the tribe who from his double tempera- 
 ment would be rather more observant and acute and 
 originative than the rest. There is, however, an- 
 other point of view from which he might be credited 
 with something distinctly additional in the way of 
 faculty. 
 
 For, in the fourth place, I believe that at this 
 stage an element of what might really be called 
 divination would come in. I believe that the blend- 
 ing of the masculine and feminine temperaments 
 would in some of these cases produce persons whose 
 perceptions would be so subtle and complex and 
 rapid as to come under the head of genius, persons 
 of intuitive mind who would perceive things with- 
 out knowing how, and follow far concatenations of 
 causes and events without concerning themselves 
 about the why — diviners and prophets in a very 
 real sense. And these persons — whether they proph- 
 esied downfall or disaster, or whether they urged 
 their people onward to conquest and victory, or 
 whether by acute combinations of observation and 
 experience they caught at the healing properties 
 of herbs or determined the starry influences on 
 62 
 
AS INVENTORS OF THE ARTS AND CRAFTS 
 
 the seasons and the crops — in almost all cases would 
 acquire and did acquire a strange reputation for 
 sanctity and divinity — arising partly perhaps out of 
 the homosexual taboo, but also out of their real pos- 
 session and command of a double-engine psychic 
 power. 
 
 The double life and nature certainly, in many 
 cases of inverts observed to-day, seems to give to 
 them an extraordinary humanity and sympathy, to- 
 gether with a remarkable power of dealing with 
 human beings. It may possibly also point to a 
 further degree of evolution than usually attained, 
 and a higher order of consciousness, very imper- 
 fectly realised, of course, but indicated. This inter- 
 action in fact, between the masculine and the 
 feminine, this mutual illumination of logic and intui- 
 tion, this combination of action and meditation, 
 may not only raise and increase the power of each of 
 these faculties, but it may give the mind a new 
 quality, and a new power of perception corre- 
 sponding to the blending of subject and object in 
 consciousness. It may possibly lead to the develop- 
 ment of that third order of perception which has 
 been called the cosmic consciousness, and which 
 may also be termed divination. "He who knows 
 the masculine," says Lao-tsze, "and at the same 
 time keeps to the feminine, will be the whole world's 
 channel. Eternal virtue will not depart from him, 
 
 63 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 and he will return again to the state of an infant." 
 To the state of an infant! — that is, he will become 
 undifferentiated from Nature, who is his mother, 
 and who will lend him all her faculties. 
 
 It is not, of course, to be supposed that the witch- 
 doctors and diviners of barbarian tribes have in 
 general reached to the high order of development 
 just described, yet it is noticeable, in the slow 
 evolution of society, how often the late and high 
 developments have been indicated in the germ in 
 primitive stages; and it may be so in this case. 
 Very interesting in this connection is the passage 
 already quoted (page 19) from Elie Reclus about 
 the initiations of the Esquimaux angakok and the 
 appearance to him of his own Genius or Double 
 from the world beyond, for almost exactly the 
 same thing is supposed to take place in the initia- 
 tion of the religious yogi in India — except that the 
 god in this latter case appears to the pupil in the 
 form of his teacher or guru. And how often in the 
 history of the Christian saints has the divinity in 
 the form of Jesus or Mary appeared to the strenuous 
 devotee, apparently as the culminating result of 
 his intense effort and aspiration, and of the open- 
 ing out of a new plane of perception in his mind! 
 It may be that with every great onward push of 
 the growing soul, and every great crisis in which 
 as it were a sheath or a husk falls away from the 
 64 
 
AS INVENTORS OF THE ARTS AND CRAFTS 
 
 expanding bud, something in the nature of a meta- 
 morphosis does really take place; and the new 
 order, the new revelation, the new form of life, is 
 seen for a moment as a Vision in glorious state of 
 a divine being within.* 
 
 •It is probable also that the considerable degree of continence, to 
 which many homosexuals are by nature or external necessity com- 
 pelled, contributes to this visionary faculty. 
 
 6 5 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 HERMAPHRODISM AMONG GODS 
 AND MORTALS 
 
 In chapter ii. above, reference is made by one of 
 the writers quoted to "the numerous stories of 
 hermaphrodites related by all the old writers on 
 America." That there are such numerous stories 
 is quite correct. Jacobus Le Moyne, who travelled 
 as artist with a French Expedition to Florida in 
 1564, left some very interesting drawings* repre- 
 senting the Indians of that region and their cus- 
 toms; and among them one representing the "Her- 
 maphrodites" — tall and powerful men, beardless, 
 but with long and abundant hair, and naked except 
 for a loin-cloth, engaged in carrying wounded or 
 dying fellow-Indians on their backs or on litters to 
 a place of safety. He says of them that in Florida 
 such folk of double nature are frequent, and that 
 
 'Indorum Floridam provinciam inhabitantium eicones, etc. (Frank- 
 furt, 1 591). Also translation of the same with hcliotypes of the en- 
 gravings (Boston, J. R. Osgood & Co., 1875.) 
 
 66 
 
HERMAPHRODISM 
 
 being robust and powerful, they are made use of 
 in the place of animals for the carrying of burdens. 
 For when their chiefs go to war the hermaphro- 
 dites carry the food; and when any of the tribe 
 die of wounds or disease they construct litters . . . 
 of wood and rushes . . . and so carry the dead 
 to the place of burial. And indeed those who are 
 stricken with any infectious disease are borne by 
 the hermaphrodites to certain appointed places, and 
 nursed and cared for by them, until they may be 
 restored to full health." 
 
 Similar stories are told by Charlevoix,* de Pauw,t 
 and others; and one seems to get a glimpse in 
 them of an intermediate class of human beings who 
 made themselves useful to the community not only 
 by their muscular strength, but by their ability and 
 willingness to act as nurses and attendants on the sick 
 and dying. 
 
 It is needless, of course, to say that these were 
 not hermaphrodites in the strict sense of the term 
 — i.e., human beings uniting in one person the func- 
 tions both of male and female — since such beings 
 do practically not exist. But it is evident that they 
 were intermediate types — in the sense of being men 
 with much of the psychologic character of women, 
 
 *P. F. X. de Charlevoix, La Nouvelle France, 2 vols. (Paris, 1744). 
 tDe Pauw, Recherches sur les Amerkains, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1768). 
 
 67 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 or in some cases women with the mentality of men; 
 and the early travellers, who had less concrete and 
 reliable information on such subjects than we have, 
 and who were already prepossessed by the belief 
 in the prevalence of hermaphroditism, leapt easily 
 to the conclusion that these strange beings were 
 indeed of that nature. De Pauw, indeed, just men- 
 tioned, positively refuses to believe in the explana- 
 tion that they were men dressed as women, and in- 
 sists that they were hermaphrodites I 
 
 In 1889, a certain Dr. A. B. Holder, anxious 
 to settle positively the existence or non-existence 
 of hermaphrodites, made some investigations among 
 the Crow-Indians of Montana — among whom the 
 Bardaches were called "Bote." * And Dr. Karsch. 
 summarising his report, saysf : — "This word, 
 bo-te, means literally 'not man, not woman.' 
 A corresponding Tulalip-word which the Indians of 
 the Washington region make use of is, accord- 
 ing to Holder, 'Burdash,' which means 'half man, 
 half woman' — and that without necessarily imply- 
 ing any anomalous structure of the sex-organs. . . . 
 The Crow-tribe, in 1889, included five such Bote, 
 and possessed about the same number before. They 
 form a class in every tribe, are well-known to each 
 
 •See for his Report, The New York Medical Journal, vol. L., No. 
 23 (7th Dec, 1889). 
 
 ^Jahrbuch fur s.Z., vol. iii., p. 138. 
 
 68 
 
HERMAPHRODISM 
 
 other, and knit friendly relations with their likes 
 in other tribes, so that they become well acquainted 
 with the Uranian relationships also in the neigh- 
 bour tribes. They wear female attire, part their 
 hair in the middle, and plait it in womanly style; 
 they possess or cultivate feminine voices and ges- 
 tures, and live continually in association with the 
 women, just as if they belonged to that sex. All 
 the same their voices, features, and figure never 
 lose their masculine quality so completely as to 
 make it hard for a careful observer to distinguish 
 a Bote from a woman. Such a Bote among the 
 Crows carried on women's work, like sweeping, 
 scrubbing, dish-washing, with such neatness and 
 willingness that he would often obtain employ- 
 ment among the white folk. Usually the feminine 
 attire is adopted in childhood, and the correspond- 
 ing ways of life at an early age, but his special 
 calling is not exercised by the Bote till the age of 
 puberty. A young scholar of an educational estab- 
 lishment — a boys' school in an Indian Agency — 
 was often caught dressing himself in secret in 
 women's clothes; and although punished on each 
 occasion, he nevertheless, after leaving school, 
 transformed himself into a Bote — to which calling 
 he has ever since remained true. A certain Bote, 
 well accredited among the Crow-tribe, who be- 
 longed to the scouting-party of Dr. Holder, was 
 
 69 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 a Dakota Indian; he is described as a splendidly 
 built young man of pleasing features, perfect 
 health, brisk alertness, and the happiest disposition. 
 Holder attached him to his own service, and finally 
 persuaded him — though only after much unwilling- 
 ness on his part — to allow himself to be personally 
 examined." The result of the examination was to 
 prove him to be physically a complete man — and, 
 moreover, an exceedingly modest one ! 
 
 The Pere Lafitau, whom I have quoted before, 
 and who was a keen observer and a broad-minded 
 man, says, in one passage of his Samiages Ameri- 
 cains: "The spectacle of the men disguised as 
 women surprised the Europeans who first landed 
 in America. And, as they did not at all under- 
 stand the motives of this sort of metamorphosis, 
 they concluded that these were folk in whom the 
 two sexes were conjoined: as a matter of fact our 
 old records always term them hermaphrodites." 
 He goes on to say that though the spirit of religion 
 which made these men embrace this mode of life 
 caused them to be regarded as extraordinary 
 beings, yet the suspicions which the Europeans 
 entertained concerning them took such hold upon 
 the latter "that they invented every possible charge 
 against them, and these imaginations inflamed the 
 zeal of Vasco Nugnes de Vabra, the Spanish cap- 
 tain who first discovered the Southern Sea (la mer 
 70 
 
HERMAPHRODISM 
 
 du Sud), to such an extent that he destroyed num- 
 bers of them by letting loose upon them those 
 savage dogs, of whom his compatriots indeed made 
 use for the purpose of exterminating a large pro- 
 portion of the Indians." 
 
 On the cruelties of the Spanish conquerors 
 among the Indian tribes — only paralleled appar- 
 ently by those of modern Commercialism among 
 the same — we need not dwell. What interests us 
 here is the evidence of the wide-spread belief in 
 hermaphroditism current among the early Euro- 
 pean travellers. That a similar belief has ruled 
 also among most primitive peoples is evident from 
 a consideration of their gods. Why it should so 
 have ruled is a question which I shall touch on 
 towards the conclusion of this chapter. The whole 
 matter, anyhow, belongs to the subjects we are 
 discussing in this book. For clearly bisexuality 
 links on to homosexuality, and the fact that this 
 characteristic was ascribed to the gods suggests 
 that in the popular mind it must have played a 
 profound and important part in human life. I will, 
 therefore, in concluding this portion of the book, 
 give some instances of this divine bisexuality. 
 
 Brahm, in the Hindu mythology, is often repre- 
 sented as two-sexed. Originally he was the sole 
 Being. But, "delighting not to be alone he wished 
 for the existence of another, and at once he became 
 
 71 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 such, as male and female embraced (united). He 
 caused this his one self to fall in twain."* Siva, 
 also, the most popular of the Hindu divinities, is 
 originally bi-sexual. In the interior of the great 
 rockhewn Temple at Elephanta the career of Siva 
 is carved in successive panels. And on the first 
 he appears as a complete full-length human being 
 conjoining the two sexes in one — the left side of 
 the figure (which represents the female portion) 
 projecting into a huge breast and hip, while the 
 right side is man-like in outline, and in the centre 
 (though now much defaced) the organs of both 
 sexes. In the second panel, however, his evolution 
 or differentiation is complete, and he is portrayed 
 as complete male with his consort Sakti or Par- 
 vati standing as perfect female beside him.t There 
 are many such illustrations in Hindu literature 
 and art, representing the gods in their double or 
 bi-sexual role — e.g., as Brahma Ardhanarisa, Siva 
 Ardhanarisa (half male and half female) 4 And 
 these again are interesting in connection with the 
 account of Elohim in the ist chapter of Genesis, 
 and the supposition that he was such an androgy- 
 
 •Quoted from the Yajur-Veda. See Bible Folk-lore: a study in 
 Corap. Mythology (London, 1884), p. 104. 
 
 tSee Adam's Peak to Elephanta, by E. Carpenter (1903), p. 308. 
 
 tSee drawings in Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism, 
 by Thomas Inman (London, 1874). 
 72 
 
HERMAPHRODISM 
 
 nous deity. For we find (v. 27) that "Elohim 
 created man in his own image, in the image of 
 Elohim created he him, male and female created 
 he them." And many commentators have main- 
 tained that this not only meant that the first man 
 was hermaphrodite, but that the Creator also was 
 of that nature. In the Midrasch we find that Rabbi 
 Samuel-bar-Nachman said that "Adam, when God 
 had created him, was a man-woman (androgyne) ;" 
 and the great and learned Maimonides supported 
 this, saying that "Adam and Eve were created 
 together, conjoined by their backs, but God divided 
 this double being, and taking one half (Eve), gave 
 her to the other half (Adam) for a mate." And 
 the Rabbi Manasseh-ben-Israel, following this up, 
 explained that when "God took one of Adam's 
 ribs to make Eve with," it should rather be ren- 
 dered "one of his sides" — that is, that he divided 
 the double Adam, and one half was Eve.* 
 
 In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (1 Adhyaya, 
 4th Brahmana) the evolution of Brahm is thus 
 described t — "In the beginning of this [world] was 
 Self alone, in the shape of a person. . . . But he 
 
 •These and some other references are taken from the learned and 
 careful study "Ueber die androgynische Idee des Lebens," by Dr. von 
 Romer, of Amsterdam, which is to be found in vol. v. of the Jahr- 
 buch fur Sexuelle Zimschenstufen (Leipzig, 1903). 
 
 iSacred Books of the East, vol. xv. ( p. 85. 
 
 73 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 felt no delight. . . . He wished for a second. He 
 was so large as man and wife together [i.e., he 
 included male and female]. He then made this 
 his Self to fall in two; and thence arose husband 
 and wife. Therefore, Yagnavalkya said : We two 
 are thus (each of us) like half a shell [or as some 
 translate, like a split pea]." The singular resem- 
 blance of this account to what has been said above 
 about the creation of Adam certainly suggests the 
 idea that Jehovah, like Brahm (and like Baal and 
 other Syrian gods), was conceived of as double- 
 sexed, and that primitive man was also conceived 
 as of like nature. The author (Ralston Skinner) 
 of The Source of Measures says (p. 159) "The 
 two words of which Jehovah is composed make up 
 the original idea of male-female of the birth-origi- 
 nator. For the Hebrew letter Jod (or J) was the 
 metnbrum virile, and Hovah was Eve, the mother 
 of all living, or the procreatrix Earth and Nature." $ 
 The tradition that mankind was anciently herma- 
 phrodite is world-old. It is referred to in Plato's 
 Banquet, where Aristophanes says: — "Anciently the 
 nature of mankind was not the same as now, but 
 different. For at first there were three sexes of 
 human beings, not two only, namely male and 
 female, as at present, but a third besides, common 
 
 tSee H. P. Blavatsky, Secret Doctrine, vol. ii., p. 132, quoted in vol. 
 v., Jahrhuch fiir S.Z., p. 76. 
 
 74 
 
HERMAPHRODISM 
 
 to both the others — of which the name remains, 
 though the sex itself has vanished. For the andro- 
 gynous sex then existed, both male and female; 
 but now it only exists as a name of reproach." 
 He then describes how all these three sorts of human 
 beings were originally double, and conjoined (as 
 above) back to back; until Jupiter, jealous of his 
 supremacy, divided them vertically "as people cut 
 apples before they preserve them, or as they cut 
 eggs with hairs" — after which, of course, these 
 divided and imperfect folk ran about over the 
 earth, ever seeking their lost halves, to be joined 
 to them again. 
 
 I have mentioned the Syrian Baal as being some- 
 times represented as double-sexed (apparently in 
 combination with Astarte). In the Septuagint (Hos. 
 ii. 8, and Zeph. i. 4) he is called 4 Baal (feminine) 
 and Arnobius tells us that his worshippers invoked 
 him thus* : "Hear us, Baal ! whether thou be a god 
 or goddess." Similarly Bel and other Babylonian 
 gods were often represented as androgyne.t 
 Mithras among the Persians is spoken of by the 
 Christian controversialist Firmicus as two-sexed, 
 and by Herodotus (Bk. i., c. 131) as identified with 
 a goddess, while there are innumerable Mithraic 
 
 •Inman's Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism (Trub- 
 ner, 1874), p. 119. 
 iPagan Christs, by John M. Robertson (1908), p. 308. 
 
 15 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 monuments on which appear the symbols of two 
 deities, male and female combined.| Even Venus 
 or Aphrodite was sometimes worshipped in the 
 double form. "In Cyprus," says Dr. Frazer in 
 his Adonis, etc. (p. 432, note), "there was a bearded 
 and masculine image of Venus (probably Astarte) 
 in female attire: according to Philochorus the deity 
 thus represented was the moon, and sacrifices were 
 offered to him or her by men clad as women, 
 and by women clad as men (see Macrobius Saturn 
 iii. 7, 2)." This bearded female deity is some- 
 times also spoken of as Aphroditus, or as Venus 
 Mylitta. Richard Burton says§: — "The Phoenicians 
 spread their androgenic worship over Greece. We 
 find the consecrated servants and votaries of Corin- 
 thian Aphrodite called Hierodouloi (Strabo, viii. 6), 
 who aided the 10,000 courtesans in gracing the 
 Venus-temple. . . . One of the headquarters of the 
 cult was Cyprus, where, as Servius relates (Ad. Aen. 
 ii. 632), stood the simulacre of a bearded Aphro- 
 dite with feminine body and costume, sceptred 
 and mitred like a man. The sexes when worship- 
 ing it exchanged habits, and here the virginity 
 was offered in sacrifice." 
 
 The worship of this bearded goddess was mainly 
 in Syria and Cyprus. But in Egypt also a repre- 
 sentation of a bearded Isis has been found, — with 
 
 tlbid., p. 307. 
 
 $The Thousand Nights and a Night (1886), vol. x., p. 231. 
 76 
 
HERMAPHRODISM 
 
 infant Horus in her lap ; * while again there are a 
 number of representations (from papyri) of the 
 goddess Neith in androgyne form, with a male 
 member (erected). And again, curiously enough, 
 the Norse Freya, or Friga, corresponding to Venus, 
 was similarly figured. Dr. von Romer says : t — 
 "Just as the Greeks had their Aphroditos as well 
 as Aphrodite so the Scandinavians had their Friggo 
 as well as their Friga. . This divinity, too, was 
 androgyne. Friga, to whom the sixth day of the 
 week was dedicated, was sometimes thought of as 
 hermaphrodite. She was represented as having 
 the members of both sexes, standing by a column 
 with a sword in her right hand, and in her left 
 a bow." 
 
 In the Orphic hymns we have: — 
 
 "Zeus was the first of all, Zeus last, the lord of the lightning ; 
 Zeus was the head, the middle, from him all things were 
 
 created ; 
 Zeus was Man, and again Zeus was the Virgin Eternal." 
 
 And in another passage, speaking of Adonis : — 
 
 "Hear me, who pray to thee, hear me O many-named and 
 
 best of deities, 
 Thou, with thy gracious hair . . . both maiden and youth, 
 
 Adonis." 
 
 Again, with regard to the latter, Ptolemaeus 
 Hephaestius (according to Photius) writes: — "They 
 
 ♦See illustration, Jahrbuch fiir S. Z., vol. v., p. 73a. 
 tSee his study already quoted, Jahrbuch, pp. 735-744- 
 
 77 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 say that the androgyne Adonis fulfilled the part 
 of a man for Aphrodite, but for Apollo the part 
 of a wife." $ 
 
 Dionysus, one of the most remarkable figures in 
 the Greek Mythology, is frequently represented as 
 androgyne. Euripides in his Bacchae calls him 
 "feminine-formed" (Gr/XO/iop^os) or thelumorphos, 
 and the Orphic hymns "double-sexed" (5u£6ijs) 
 or diphues; and Aristides.in his discourse on Diony- 
 sus says: — "Thus the God is both male and female. 
 His form corresponds to his nature, since every- 
 where in himself he is like a double being; for 
 among young men he is a maiden, and among 
 maidens a young man, and among men a beard- 
 less youth overflowing with vitality." In the 
 museum at Naples there is a very fine sculptured 
 head of Dionysus, which though bearded has a 
 very feminine expression, and is remindful of the 
 traditional head of Christ. "In legend and art," 
 says Dr. Frazer,* "there are clear traces of an 
 effeminate Dionysus, and in some of his rites and 
 processions men wore female attire. Similar things 
 are reported of Bacchus, who was, of course, an- 
 other form of Dionysus. Even Hercules, that most 
 masculine figure, was said to have dressed as a 
 woman for three years, during which he was the 
 
 tSee Jahrbuch, as above, pp. 8o6, 807 and 809. 
 *Ad»nis, etc., p. 432. 
 
 78 
 
HERMAPHRODISM 
 
 slave of Omphale, queen of Lydia. "If we sup- 
 pose," says Dr. Frazer,t "that queen Omphale, 
 like queen Semiramis, was nothing but the great 
 Asiatic goddess, or one of her Avatars, it becomes 
 probable that the story of the womanish Hercules 
 of Lydia preserves a reminiscence of a line or 
 college of effeminate priests who, like the eunuch 
 priests of the Syrian goddess, dressed as women 
 in imitation of their goddess, and were supposed 
 to be inspired by her. The probability is increased 
 by the practice of the priests of Heracles at Anti- 
 machia in Cos, who, as we have just seen, actually 
 wore female attire when they were engaged in 
 their sacred duties. Similarly at the vernal mys- 
 teries of Hercules in Rome the men were draped 
 in the garments of women." 
 
 Such instances could be rather indefinitely multi- 
 plied. Apollo is generally represented with a 
 feminine — sometimes with an extremely feminine — 
 bust and figure. The great hero Achilles passed 
 his youth among women, and in female disguise. 
 Everyone knows the recumbent marble Herma- 
 phrodite in the Louvre. There are also in the 
 same collection two or three elegant bronzes of 
 Aphrodite-like female figures in the standing posi- 
 tion — but of masculine sex. What is the explana- 
 tion of all this? 
 
 Mbid., p. 431. 
 
 79 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 It is evident that the conception of a double sex, 
 or of a sex combining the characters of male and 
 female, haunted the minds of early peoples. Yet 
 we have no reason for supposing that such a com- 
 bination, in any complete and literal sense, ever 
 existed. Modern physiological investigation has 
 never produced a single case of a human being 
 furnished with the complete organs of both sexes, 
 and capable of fulfilling the functions of both. 
 And the unfortunate malformations which do exist 
 in this direction are too obviously abortive and 
 exceptional to admit of their being generalised or 
 exalted into any kind of norm or ideal. All we 
 can say is that — though in the literal sense no 
 double forms exist — certainly a vast number of inter- 
 mediate forms of male and female are actually 
 found, which are double in the sense that the 
 complete organs of one sex are conjoined with 
 some or nearly all of the (secondary) characters of 
 the other sex; and that we have every reason to 
 believe that these intermediate types have existed 
 in considerable numbers from the remotest anti- 
 quity. That being so, it is possible that the obser- 
 vation or influence of these intermediate types 
 led to a tentative and confused idealisation of a 
 double type. 
 
 Anyhow the fact remains — that these idealisa- 
 tions of the double type are so numerous. And it 
 80 
 
HERMAPHRODISM 
 
 is interesting to notice that while they begin in 
 early times with being merely grotesque and sym- 
 bolical, they end in the later periods by becoming 
 artistic and gracious and approximated to the real 
 and actual. The Indian Siva, with his right side mas- 
 culine and his left side feminine, is in no way 
 beautiful or attractive; any more than Brahma 
 with twenty arms and twenty legs. And the same 
 may be said of the bearded Egyptian Isis or the 
 bearded Syrian Aphrodite. These were only rude 
 and inartistic methods of conveying an idea. The 
 later spirit, however, found a better way of expres- 
 sion. It took its cue from the variations of type 
 to be seen every day in the actual world; and 
 instead of representing the Persian Mithra as a 
 two-sexed monster, it made him a young man, 
 but of very feminine outline. The same with the 
 Greek Apollo; while on the other hand, the female 
 who is verging toward the male type is represented 
 by Artemis or even by the Amazons. 
 
 It may be said: — we can understand this repre- 
 sentation of intermediate forms from actual life, 
 but we do not see why such mingling of the sexes 
 should be ascribed to the gods, unless it might be 
 from a merely fanciful tendency to personify the 
 two great powers of nature in one being — in which 
 case it is strange that the tendency should have 
 been so universal. To this we may reply that 
 
 81 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 probably the reason or reasons for this tendency 
 must be accounted quite deep-rooted and anything 
 but fanciful. One reason, it seems to me, is the 
 psychological fact that in the deeps of human 
 nature (as represented by Brahm and Siva in the 
 Hindu philosophy, by Zeus in the Orphic Hymns, by 
 Mithra in the Zend-a vesta, etc.) the sex-tempera- 
 ment is undifferentiated;* and it is only in its 
 later and more external and partial manifestations 
 that it branches decidedly into male and female; 
 and that, therefore, in endeavouring through religion 
 to represent the root facts of life, there was always 
 a tendency to cultivate and honor hermaphroditism, 
 and to ascribe some degree of this quality to 
 heroes and divinities. The other possible reason 
 is that as a matter of fact the great leaders and 
 heroes did often exhibit this blending of masculine 
 and feminine qualities and habits in their actual 
 lives, and that therefore at some later period, when 
 exalted to divinities, this blending of qualities was 
 strongly ascribed to them and was celebrated in 
 the rites and ceremonies of their religion and their 
 temples. The feminine traits in genius (as in a 
 Shelley or a Byron) are well marked in the present 
 day. We have only to go back to the Persian Bab 
 
 'Compare the undifferentiated sex-tendencies of boys and girls at 
 puberty and shortly after. 
 82 
 
HERMAPHRODISM 
 
 of the last century * or to a St. Francis or even to 
 a Jesus of Nazareth, to find the same traits present 
 in founders and leaders of religious movements in 
 historical times. And it becomes easy to suppose 
 the same again of those early figures — who once 
 probably were men — those Apollos, Buddhas, 
 Dionysus, Osiris, and so forth — to suppose that 
 they too were somewhat bi-sexual in temperament, 
 and that it was really largely owing to that fact 
 that they were endowed with far-reaching powers 
 and became leaders of mankind. In either case — 
 whichever reason is adopted — it corroborates the 
 general thesis and argument of this paper. 
 
 *AH Muhammed, who called himself the Bab (or Gate), was born 
 at Shiraz in 1820. In 1844 he commenced preaching his gospel, which 
 was very like that of Jesus, and which now has an immense follow- 
 ing. In 1850 he was shot, at Tabriz, as a malefactor, and his be- 
 loved disciple Mirza Muhammed AH, refusing to leave him, was 
 shot with him. 
 
 83 
 
PART II 
 THE INTERMEDIATE AS WARRIOR 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 MILITARY COMRADESHIP AMONG THE 
 DORIAN GREEKS 
 
 In the preceding chapters, especially the earlier 
 ones, we have seen how, among a vast number of 
 primitive peoples, the Uranian temperament and 
 tendency has contributed to the cultivation of divi- 
 nation and prophecy, religious ceremonial, song, 
 dance, literature, medicine, and so forth. We 
 inferred a priori that the man of those days who 
 experienced a distaste for warfare and the chase 
 would not unnaturally discover other fields of ac- 
 tivity, and develop these milder arts and crafts of 
 life, and we found that as a matter of fact this 
 commonly happened. Such a man was no doubt 
 in some cases "effeminate," as we should say: but 
 where not exactly that, he was, at any rate, a 
 trifle more feminine than his quite normal brother 
 — and hence the differentiation in his pursuits. 
 
 We have now, however, to see that among some 
 early peoples the Uranian temperament favored a 
 
 87 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 quite different development; it took on a much 
 more masculine character, and led to the forma- 
 tion of military comradeships of a passionate kind 
 which, instead of discounting, immensely strength- 
 ened the warlike ardour of the people concerned, 
 and confirmed their success in campaigns and con- 
 quests. The homosexual tendency, in fact, among 
 such peoples, instead of urging towards effeminacy, 
 worked greatly in the opposite direction. It bred 
 ideals of heroism, courage, resource, and endur- 
 ance among the men, and exalted these virtues into 
 the highest place of public honor. Such was the 
 case among the Dorian Greeks of the 7th century 
 or so, B.C. — of whom I am treating in the present 
 section; and such also seems to have been the 
 case among the Japanese Samurai of the 12th, 13th,. 
 and later centuries, A.D., whom I shall deal with 
 presently. In a lesser degree, too, there is evi- 
 dence of a similar tendency among some other 
 tribes and peoples. 
 
 The chief modern accounts of the Dorian Mili- 
 tary love are to be found in the History and Anti- 
 quities of the Doric Race, by C. O. Muller,* and 
 in Professor E. Bethe's long treatise, Die Dorische 
 Knabenliebe, printed in Frankfurt in 1907.! John 
 
 •2 vols., translated from the German by G. Cornewall Lewis (John 
 Murray, 1830). 
 tin the Rheinisches Museum, vol. lxii., pp. 438-475. 
 
 88 
 
THE DORIAN MILITARY COMRADESHIP 
 
 Addington Symonds also, in his A Problem in 
 Greek Ethics, pp. 23, 24 et seq. of the original 
 edition (1883), gives a sketch of the subject and his 
 views about it. 
 
 It seems that the rough and warlike tribes of 
 the Dorians, descending into Greece from Doris 
 and the mountains of the north and west at an 
 early period, probably before 800 B.C., subdued 
 and enslaved the former inhabitants as they came, 
 and largely introduced their own institutions into 
 the countries which they occupied. They spread 
 thus over Sparta and a large part of the Pelopon- 
 nesus, through the southern archipelago of the 
 iEgean to the coast of Asia Minor, and finally 
 to the island of Crete, in which latter place their 
 customs were preserved for a long period in primi- 
 tive integrity. 
 
 Chief among such customs was this one of mili- 
 tary comradeship or paiderastia. The Greek word 
 iraiSepaaria (literally "boy-love") had apparently 
 a wide range of meaning. For a full understand- 
 ing of it, J. A. Symonds' Problem in Greek Ethics 
 may with advantage be consulted. The term seems 
 to have applied generally to the love of an elder 
 comrade for a younger; but as far as it referred 
 to or originated from the military relationship it 
 is evident that our word "boy" is hardly appro- 
 priate. Clearly the younger had to be of sufficient 
 
 89 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 age or physical stature to bear arms effectively; 
 and his commonly used name vapatrradkvs or irapaaraTris 
 — the "stand-by" or "stander-by" — is a good indi- 
 cation of his function and utility. He corresponded 
 in fact, in many respects, to the squire who attended 
 on the mediaeval knight; and while such a squire 
 might often be quite youthful, we do not exactly 
 think of him as a "boy." The difference of age 
 therefore in this military comradeship might be 
 slight or negligible, or in cases it might be con- 
 siderable. 
 
 Again, this kind of love was apparently always 
 conceived of as having an element of physical 
 passion in it — though this element might, of course, 
 be quite slight, or it might be dominant and 
 engrossing. Historically speaking, too, and in dif- 
 ferent periods and connections, the meaning of the 
 term varied; if it indicated originally the rather 
 heroic devotion of comrades to each other in cam- 
 paign and warfare, it branched out later into other 
 fields of life, and was adapted to the more spiritual 
 relationship commended by Plato — the philosophia 
 combined with paiderastia of the ideal man — or 
 again to the frankly sensual attachment described 
 in passages of the Greek Anthology. The word 
 consequently has a rather extensive connotation. 
 
 In the present paper I incline to use both words, 
 "comrade-love" and "paiderastia," to denote the 
 90 
 
THE DORIAN MILITARY COMRADESHIP 
 
 Dorian relation, bearing in mind, of course, that 
 a difference of age is generally understood, and 
 using the latter term rather more for the physical 
 and ceremonial side of the attachment, and the 
 former rather more for the emotional and social 
 bond — but without pressing this distinction too 
 closely or persistently. And it might be helpful 
 here to remind the reader, who is troubled as to 
 "where to draw the line" in estimating this kind 
 of love — and in order to help him towards an under- 
 standing of the whole subject — that the painful 
 rending-asunder and divorce of the "spiritual" 
 from the "physical," which so vexes the modern 
 mind, had probably but small place in the minds of 
 many earlier peoples, like the Dorians, whom we 
 are now considering. 
 
 I cannot perhaps do better by way of description 
 of this institution than to quote the careful account 
 of it both in Sparta and in Crete given by C. O. 
 Miiller in his great work.* He says: — "At Sparta 
 the party loving was called tiairvrjkas and his affec- 
 tion was termed a breathing-in or inspiring (kioiwuv) ; 
 which expresses the pure and mental connection 
 between the two persons, and corresponds with 
 the name of the other, viz., &lras i.e., listener or 
 hearer. Now it appears to have been the practice 
 
 ^History and Antiquities of the Doric Race, Book iv., ch. 4, p. 6; 
 see also E. Carpenter's Iolaus, pp. 16-19. 
 
 91 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 for every youth of good character to have his lover; 
 and on the other hand, every well educated man 
 was bound by custom to be the lover of some youth. 
 Instances of this connection are furnished by 
 several of the royal family of Sparta; thus Agesi- 
 laus, while he still belonged to the herd (A-yeX?;) 
 of youths, was the hearer (Atras) 'of Lysander, and 
 himself had in his time also a hearer; his son 
 Archidamus was the lover of the son of Sphodrias, 
 the noble Cleonymus; Cleomenes III. was, when a 
 young man, the hearer of Xenares, and later in 
 life the lover of the brave Panteus. The con- 
 nection usually originated from the proposal of 
 the lover; yet it was necessary that the listener 
 should regard him with real affection, as a regard 
 :o the riches of the proposer was considered very 
 disgraceful; sometimes, however, it happened that 
 :he proposal originated from the other party. The 
 :onnection appears to have been very intimate and 
 faithful; and was recognised by the State. If 
 lis relations were absent, the youth might be 
 •epresented in the public assembly by his lover; 
 n battle, too, they stood near one another, where 
 heir fidelity and affection were often shown till 
 leath, while at home the youth was constantly 
 inder the eyes of his lover, who was to him as it 
 vere a model and pattern of life; which explains 
 vhy, for many faults, particularly for want of 
 
 )2 
 
THE DORIAN MILITARY COMRADESHIP 
 
 ambition, the lover could be punished instead o; 
 the listener. . . ." 
 
 "This ancient national custom prevailed wit! 
 still greater force in Crete, which island was henc< 
 by many persons considered as the original sea' 
 of the connection in question. Here, too, it wai 
 disgraceful for a well-educated youth to be with 
 out a lover; and hence the party loved was termec 
 KXeivds, the praised; the lover being simply callec 
 
 Of the institution in Crete — of which the traditior 
 still existed in his time — Strabo, in his Geographica 
 gives a detailed account.* And his account is 
 particularly interesting on account of the similarity 
 of the uses which he describes to the custom oi 
 ordinary marriage-by-capture, with which all 
 students of primitive society are familiar. Quoting 
 from Ephorus, who wrote about 340 B.C., Strabc 
 says: — "They have a peculiar custom with respect 
 to their attachments. They do not influence the 
 objects of their love by persuasion, but have 
 recourse to violent abduction. The lover apprises 
 the friends of the youth, three or more days before- 
 hand, of his intention to carry off the object of 
 his affection. It is reckoned a most base act to 
 conceal the youth, or not to permit him to walk 
 
 *Strabo, Book x., ch. 4, p. 21 (Bohn's edition of the classics). 
 
 93 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 ibout as usual, since it would be an acknowledg- 
 nent that the youth was unworthy of such lover. 
 But if they are informed that the ravisher is equal 
 )r superior in rank or other circumstances to the 
 routh, they pursue and oppose the former slightly, 
 nerely in conformity with the custom. They then 
 villing allow him to carry off the youth. If, 
 lowever, he is an unworthy person, they take the 
 r outh from him. This show of resistance does not 
 :nd till the youth is received into the Andreium 
 'men's quarters), to which the ravisher belongs. 
 They do not regard as an object of affection a 
 r outh exceedingly handsome, but him who is dis- 
 inguished for courage and modesty (decorum). 
 The lover makes the youth presents, and takes him 
 way to whatever place he likes. The persons 
 •resent at the abduction accompany them, and, 
 laving passed two months in feasting and the 
 base (for it is not permitted to detain the youth 
 onger), they return to the city. The youth is 
 lismissed with presents, which consist of a mili- 
 ary dress, an ox, and a drinking-cup ; the last are 
 irescribed by law; and besides there are many 
 ither very costly gifts, so that the friends contribute 
 ach their share in order to diminish the expense. 
 "The youth sacrifices the ox to Jupiter, and 
 entertains at a feast those who came down with 
 dm from the mountains. He then declares con- 
 14 
 
THE DORIAN MILITARY COMRADESHIP 
 
 cerning the intercourse with the lover whether it 
 took place with his consent or not, since the law 
 allows him, if any violence is used in the abduction, 
 to insist upon redress, and sets him free from his 
 engagement to the lover. But for the beautiful 
 and high-born not to have lovers is disgraceful, 
 since the neglect would be attributed to a bad 
 disposition. 
 
 "The Parastathentes, for this is the name which 
 they give to those youths who have been carried 
 away, enjoy certain honors. At races and at fes- 
 tivals they have the principal places. They are 
 permitted to wear the stole, which distinguishes 
 them from other persons, and which has been 
 presented to them by their lovers; and not only 
 at that time, but in mature age, they appear in 
 distinctive dress, by which each individual is recog- 
 nised as Kleinos, for this name is given to the 
 object of their attachment, and that of Philetor to 
 the lover. These, then are the usages concerning 
 attachments." 
 
 And C. O. Miiller, continuing the passage I 
 cited before, says: — "Institutions so systematic and 
 regular as these did not exist in any Doric State 
 except Crete and Sparta; but the feelings on which 
 they were founded seem xo have been common 
 to all the Dorians. The loves of Philolaus, a 
 Corinthian of the family of the Bacchiadas, and the 
 
 95 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 law-giver of Thebes, and of Diodes, the Olympic 
 conqueror, lasted until death; and even their graves 
 were turned toward each other in token of their 
 affection; and another person of the same name 
 was honored in Megara as a noble instance of self- 
 devotion for the object of his love." 
 
 With regard to the genesis of the institution, 
 J. Addington Symonds, in his Problem in Greek 
 Ethics (original edition, 1883, p. 23), says: — "It has 
 frequently occurred to my mind that the mixed type 
 of iraibtpaoria. which I have named Greek Love, 
 took its origin in Doris. Homer, who knew nothing 
 about the passion as it afterwards existed, drew a 
 striking picture of masculine affection in Achilles. 
 Friendship occupies the first place in the hero's 
 heart, while only the second is reserved for sexual 
 emotion. Now Achilles came from Phthia, itself 
 a portion of that mountain region to which Doris 
 belonged. Is it unnatural to conjecture that the 
 Dorians in their migration to Lacedaemon and 
 Crete, the recognised headquarters of the custom, 
 carried a tradition of heroic iraidtpaaHa along with 
 them? If so, the circumstances of their invasion 
 would have fostered the transformation into a tribal 
 institution. They went forth, a band of warriors 
 and pirates, to cross the sea in boats, and to fight 
 their way along the hills and plains of Southern 
 Greece. The dominions they had conquered with 
 96 
 
THE DORIAN MILITARY COMRADESHIP 
 
 their swords they occupied like soldiers. The camp 
 became their country, and for a long time they 
 literally lived upon the bivouac. . . . Fighting and 
 foraging in company, sharing the same wayside 
 board and heathstrewn bed, rallying to the com- 
 rade's voice in onset, relying on the comrade's 
 shield when fallen, these men learned the mean- 
 ings of the words $iXi}Twp and irapaariir-qs. To be 
 loved was honorable, for it implied being worthy 
 to be died for. To love was glorious, since it 
 pledged the lover to self-sacrifice in case of need." 
 Professor Bethe, in his article on Die Dorische 
 Knabenliebe, to which I have already alluded, says 
 (p. 447) : — "Among the Dorians, although the prac- 
 tice was no doubt sensual,* paiderastia was not by 
 any means a crime; on the contrary, it was, or 
 could be, or aspired to be, the most complete 
 imaginable union and mutual devotion of two 
 tribesmen, out of which sprung abundant noble 
 impulses towards the perfection of each individual 
 in rivalry with the other, and the most absolute 
 
 *MiiIIer maintains the general chastity of the institution, quoting 
 Xenophon and others; but Bethe contests this, referring to Plato {The 
 Laws) and Aristotle (vol. ii. 10), where it is suggested that one of 
 its objects was the prevention of overpopulation. Probably in this, 
 as in other such cases, it is impossible to make any very definite 
 statement. Whatever general theories there might be, practice would 
 vary widely from place to place and from people to people, and 
 public opinion would do the same. 
 
 97 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 surrender for the sake of the loved one in every 
 danger, and even to death in the very bloom of 
 life. So that the true ideal of military comrade- 
 ship and high endeavor was realised in these 
 lover^pairs, who cherished these ideas and sealed 
 them with their blood. And the number of such 
 has certainly been anything but small. Is it not 
 the most wonderful phenomenon in the history of 
 human culture?" 
 
 The closeness of the alliance, moreover, is indi- 
 cated in the foregoing quotation from Strabo, which 
 shows, as we have seen, that certain formalities 
 attending it precisely resembled the primitive rites 
 of ordinary marriage, in the well-known form of 
 "Marriage by capture." And this fact — as Bethe 
 and others have observed — suggests the great 
 antiquity of the institution and also its wide rami- 
 fication. Professor Bethe indeed says: — "Conse- 
 quently the custom must date from a high 
 antiquity, and since certain traces of it in Corinth 
 and Boeotia coincide with the practice in Crete, I 
 think the conclusion is not too rash that not only 
 there but among all the Dorians these same forms 
 once prevailed, and that therefore they date back 
 even to the time before the Dorian immigration, 
 or at any rate before their dispersal." 
 
 The remarks of Strabo above refer especially to 
 Crete, but we have just seen that some indica- 
 98 
 
THE DORIAN MILITARY COMRADESHIP 
 
 tions of a marriage-ceremonial were to be found 
 in Corinth and Boeotia; and it is interesting to 
 note that in Albania — which is the very land from 
 which the Dorans probably came — a marriage- 
 ceremonial still lingers on to-day and is perfectly 
 recognised as customary between a man and a 
 youth who are attached to each other.* Any- 
 how, whether the formalities of marriage were 
 observed or not, the general institution of military 
 comradeship, as we have described it, spread far 
 and wide among the Greek peoples, and immense 
 importance was attached to it. It became a sort 
 of foundational element in their life, a publicly 
 recognised source of political and social activity, 
 an incentive to soldierly valour, and a bulwark of 
 security to the state, an inspiration to art and 
 literature, and a custom consecrated by religion 
 and divine approval. Innumerable stories and 
 legends — whether of "Harmodius and Aristogeiton 
 who slew the despot Hipparchus at Athens; of 
 Diodes and Philolaus, who gave laws to Thebes; 
 of Chariton and Melanippus, who resisted the sway 
 of Phalaris in Sicily; or of Cratinus and Aristo- 
 demus, who devoted their lives to propitiate 
 offended deities when a plague had fallen on 
 
 *See Hahn's Albanesische Studien, vol. :., p. 166, where consider- 
 able light altogether is thrown on the Dorian comradeship. 
 
 99 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 Athens," f testify to the profound interest felt in 
 the subject. And similar stories J from Sparta, 
 from Chalkis, from Elis, Euboea, and Other places, 
 show how wide and universal was the impression. 
 As far back as the time of Solon at Athens, the 
 inspiration of paiderastia had taken such hold, and 
 was felt to be so thoroughly honorable, that even 
 he, Athens' great and wise law-giver, wrote poems 
 in praise of it, and in his laws placed the pursuit 
 of it and of athletics on a par, as worthy of, and to 
 be encouraged in free men, but as forbidden to 
 slaves.* Aeschylus and Sophocles did not dis- 
 dain to make comrade-love the theme of two of 
 their tragedies — the Myrmidones and Niobe respec- 
 tively — nor is evidence wanting that they personally 
 favored it themselves; and Plato, of course, makes 
 it the corner-stone of much of his philosophy and 
 of more than one of his dialogues. Plato's strong 
 and weighty verdict on the value of this bond — 
 a verdict which was apparently a reflection of a 
 good deal of current opinion — is given in the speech 
 of Pausanias in the Symposium, in the form of a 
 rebuke against those peoples who did not honor 
 the love: — "In Ionia and other places, and gener- 
 
 tSee Studies of the Greek Poets, by J. A. Symonds, vol. i., p. 97. 
 tSee Plutarch's Eroticus, his Lives, etc. 
 *See Plutarch's Solon, ch. i. 
 IOO 
 
THE DORIAN MILITARY COMRADESHIP 
 
 ally in countries which are subject to the Bar- 
 barians, the custom is held to be dishonorable; 
 loves of youths share the evil repute of philosophy 
 and gymnastics, because they are inimical to 
 tyranny; for the interests of rulers require that 
 their subjects should be poor in spirit, and that 
 there should be no strong bond of friendship or 
 society among them, — which Love above all other 
 motives is likely to inspire, as our Athenian tyrants 
 learned by experience." 
 
 Finally, the splendid heroism of the Theban 
 band, composed solely of lovers — which perished to 
 a man at Chaeronaea, B.C. 338, in the last battle 
 of Greek Independence, against the huge army 
 of Philip of Macedon — set a kind of seal to the 
 great tradition of Greek military comradeship, and 
 marked it with an ineffaceable impression of 
 grandeur. 
 
 IOI 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE DORIAN COMRADESHIP IN 
 RELATION TO THE STATUS OF WOMAN 
 
 Although, as has been already indicated, there 
 are instances of manly and military institutions of 
 somewhat similar quality among other early peoples, 
 it is doubtful whether in the history of the world 
 there has ever been another case of such complete 
 acceptance of comrade-love as a valued and recog- 
 nised cult; and certainly this cult has never been 
 associated with such priceless contributions to art, 
 literature and civilisation generally, as in the case 
 of the Greeks. It is consequently all the more 
 strange to find with what neglect the whole sub- 
 ject — both of the love itself and of its relation 
 to political and social life — has been treated in 
 modern times. It is difficult to understand the 
 attitude of mind which — as in some professorial 
 and literary circles — is never tired of pointing out 
 the excellencies of the Greek civilisation, the public 
 1 02 
 
RELATION TO STATUS OF WOMAN 
 
 spirit and bravery of its peoples, their instinct for 
 beauty, their supremacy (especially at Athens) in 
 literature and art; and yet absolutely ignores a 
 matter which was obviously a foundation element 
 of that civilisation. 
 
 The only feasible explanation, to my mind, of 
 this strange phenomenon is that people — taking 
 (it must be said) a very easy-going and super- 
 ficial view of the whole subject — have assumed 
 that the love-customs and institutions which have 
 been described above were merely adopted as a 
 blind or a cloak for sensuality, and were of no 
 particular importance in themselves. Everyone 
 knows, of course, that homosexual habits of a 
 more or less frivolous and ephemeral kind are 
 to be found fairly widely spread among most 
 peoples; and as it has been generally assumed 
 among Western moralists that nothing good can 
 proceed from the homosexual instinct, it has been 
 possible for a certain class of minds either to pass 
 over the said institutions as being frivolous and 
 unimportant too, or else, if forced to acknowledge 
 their value and importance, to separate this aspect 
 of them entirely from the homosexual aspect, and 
 to say that while the former was glorious the latter 
 was negligible. But as I say, this kind of view 
 is of the most superficial sort. It is impossible, 
 with any seriousness, or deliberate consideration, 
 
 103 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 to maintain on the one hand that the institution of 
 military comradeship among the Dorians — branch- 
 ing out as it did later in the various Greek states 
 into an inspiration of political freedom, or of art, 
 or of philosophy — was frivolous or unimportant; 
 and it is equally impossible on the other hand, to 
 weigh the evidence and not see that a most inti- 
 mate and, to some degree, physical relation lay 
 at the root of the institution and could not possibly 
 be separated from it — not to see, in fact, that what 
 we call homosexuality was of the essence of the 
 thing. All the historical evidence, and all the 
 literature of this period — whether serious or fan- 
 ciful, whether in prose or in verse — point to this 
 intimate unity; and what the people themselves, 
 who knew all the circumstances, associated so 
 closely together, it is hard for us to separate and 
 disunite. 
 
 We must conclude, then, that the Dorian Greeks 
 and those who were influenced by them regarded 
 a very close and personal love between men as 
 part and parcel of their civic life. Though homo- 
 sexual, as we should say, in its quality, this love 
 did not interfere with the institution of normal 
 or ordinary marriage, which existing alongside of 
 it had its own sphere of civic value and service 
 — while the comrade-love occupied another sphere, 
 equally necessary. 
 104 
 
RELATION TO STATUS OF WOMAN 
 
 This being so, it would obviously be as absurd 
 to try to explain away the Greek comradeship, 
 and all the life that flowed from it, by its connection 
 with sensual pleasure of a certain kind, as it would 
 be to explain away the joys and activities of mar- 
 riage, and the life of the family, by the phenomena 
 of concubinage and hetairism. 
 
 There is, however, another explanation which 
 has from time to time been put forward — namely, 
 that the predominance of the Uranian affection in 
 the Greek States was due to the contempt or 
 neglect of women which prevailed there; and 
 this may demand a brief consideration. 
 
 Supposing such contempt and neglect to have 
 been proved, the argument even then is not very 
 satisfactory, for it would still remain uncertain 
 which might be the horse and which the cart in 
 the sequence — which the cause and which the 
 effect. But as a matter of fact, to prove anything 
 like general disregard or neglect of women by the 
 Greek peoples would be difficult. Lowes Dickin- 
 son, in his Greek View of Life, insists on the preva- 
 lent conception among them of the inferiority of 
 the female sex, but he finds himself obliged (p. 164) 
 to qualify this by large exceptions, and he points 
 out (what most authorities agree in) that great fluc- 
 tuations occurred, and that while in Homer there 
 ruled "a conception of woman and of her relation 
 
 105 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 to man finer and nobler in some respects than 
 that of modern times," in the 5th and 4th centuries, 
 B.C., a comparatively low estimate had become 
 dominant. Benecke, in his Women in Greek Poetry, 
 (Sonnenschein, 1896,) goes with much care into 
 this subject, and makes some remarks which are 
 very helpful for our purpose. He says (p. 7) : — 
 "It is generally agreed that in prehistoric times 
 the position of women among the Greeks was a 
 much higher one than was the case subsequently. 
 There seems every reason to believe that the social 
 conditions of the Lesbians and the Dorians, and 
 the other nations which did not come under the 
 influence of the history-writing Ionians, were but 
 the survivals of what was originally a more or 
 less general state." This is especially interesting 
 to us because it points to the fact that the insti- 
 tution of military comradeship which came into 
 Greece with the Dorians from prehistoric sources 
 must have been in its inception associated with 
 just such a high standard in the position of women, 
 and not by any means with their neglect or con- 
 tempt. This association is also very noticeable 
 in Homer. For the main motive of the Iliad is, as 
 Benecke observes, undoubtedly the dramatic and 
 passionate comradeship between Achilles and Patro- 
 clus; yet no one could say that Andromache or 
 Penelope or Nausicaa are negligible or servile 
 characters. 
 106 
 
RELATION TO STATUS OF WOMAN 
 
 There is ample evidence indeed to show that the 
 status of women among the early Dorians was 
 one of freedom and honour — a survival, perhaps, 
 of a matriarchal period. Addington Symonds, in 
 his Key of Blue* (p. 64), says: — "This masculine 
 love did not exclude marriage, nor had it the 
 effect of lowering the position of women in society, 
 since it is notorious that in those Dorian States 
 where the love of comrades became an institution, 
 women received more public honour and enjoyed 
 fuller liberty and power over property than else- 
 where." C. O. Miiller, in his already quoted book 
 (vol. ii., p. 395), says: — "The Dorians, as well 
 at Sparta as in the South of Italy, were almost 
 the only nation who esteemed the higher attributes 
 of the female mind as capable of cultivation." 
 In Sparta the women had great sway and influence. 
 The wife was called Sktnroiva (mistress) by the hus- 
 band. As girls they were "trained by physical 
 exercise for the healthy performance of the duties 
 of motherhood; they were taught to run and wrestle 
 naked, like the youths, to dance and sing in public, 
 and to associate freely with men. Marriage was 
 permitted only in the prime of life; and a free 
 intercourse, outside the limits of marriage, between 
 healthy men and women was encouraged and 
 approved by public opinion. "f 
 
 •Published by John Lane (London, 1893). 
 tLowes Dickinson, The Greek Vienu of Life, p. 97. 
 
 IO7 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 It may be worth while to quote entire the pas- 
 sage in which Plutarch (Lycurgus, c. 14) describes 
 this state of affairs. He first of all cites Aristotle 
 as saying (Polit, Book ii.) that "in the absence 
 of their husbands, the wives made themselves abso- 
 lute mistresses at home, and would be treated 
 with as much respect as if they had been so many 
 queens;" and then he goes on to say that Lycurgus 
 "took for that sex all the care that was possible. 
 As an instance of it, he ordered the maidens to 
 exercise themselves with wrestling, running, throw- 
 ing the bar, and casting the dart, to the end that 
 the fruit they conceived might take deeper root, 
 and grow strong, and spread itself in strong and 
 healthy bodies; and withal that they themselves, 
 by such robust exercises, might be the more able 
 to undergo the pains of child-bearing with ease 
 and safety. And to the end he might take away 
 their overgreat tenderness and that acquired 
 womanishness which vain custom hath added to 
 the natural, he ordered that they should go naked 
 as well as the young men, and dance, too, in that 
 condition at their solemn feasts and sacrifices, sing- 
 ing certain songs, whilst the young men stood in 
 a ring about them, seeing and hearing them. In 
 these songs they now and then gave a satirical 
 glance, to very good purpose, on those who ha<i 
 misbehaved themselves (in the wars), and some- 
 108 
 
RELATION TO STATUS OF WOMAN 
 
 times sang enconiums upon such as had done 
 any gallant action; and by these means enflamed 
 the younger sort with an emulation of their glory. 
 Those that were thus praised for their bravery, 
 and in high credit among the virgins, went away 
 hugely satisfied with such commendation; and 
 those who were rallied were as sensibly touched 
 with it as if they had been formally and severely 
 reprimanded; and so much the more because the 
 Kings and the whole Senate, as well as the rest of 
 the city, went to see and hear all that passed."* 
 
 This passage is particularly interesting here for 
 two reasons: — (i) because it shows the respect of 
 the men for the opinion of the women — their praise 
 or their blame; and (2) because of the extraordi- 
 narily public and open life of the latter, here 
 represented, and the equality of their physical 
 training with that of the men. With regard to 
 this last, we have in the Epithalamium of Theocritus 
 (Idyll xviii.) a charming picture of a chorus of 
 Spartan maidens singing before the bridal chamber 
 of Helen, and reminding her of how they used to 
 exercise by the banks of the Eurotas: — 
 
 "Thrice eighty yirgins we pursued the race, 
 Like men, anointed with the glistering oil." § 
 
 No wonder it has been said of the Spartans that 
 
 •Dacier's translation, vol. i. 
 
 §Translation by M. J. Chapman (London, 1836). 
 
 IO9 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 they were "the most healthy of the Greeks, and 
 that the most beautiful men as well as women were 
 found amongst them."f Nor can we be surprised 
 to read further in Plutarch the anecdote of Gorgo, 
 wife of King Leonidas, — "who being told, in dis- 
 course with some foreign ladies, 'You women of 
 Lacedaemon are they only of the world who have 
 an empire over the men,' she briskly reparteed: 
 'A good reason, for we are the only women who 
 bring forth Men.' " J All this goes to show clearly 
 enough that — however it may have been in other 
 Greek States, or at other times — contempt and 
 neglect of women did not prevail in Sparta in the 
 period which we are considering; and it proves 
 conclusively that the institution of military love 
 among the Dorians did not rest upon inferiority in 
 the character of the women, or on any insufficiency 
 of access to them.* The love was an independent 
 and authentic phenomenon, self-produced out of the 
 heart and temperament of the people, and not to 
 be explained away by adventitious and subsidiary 
 circumstances. 
 
 And it suggests a further speculation, namely, 
 whether the Uranian temperament in the Dorian 
 
 tMiiller, op. cit., vol. ii., p. 327. 
 
 JDacier's Plutarch, vol. i., p. 215. 
 
 •Though as regards the latter, Symonds suggests (A Problem in 
 Greek Ethics, p. 2) that in camp-life this may have been one con- 
 tributing cause. 
 IIO 
 
RELATION TO STATUS OF WOMAN 
 
 men — or such amount of it as existed among them 
 — did not naturally favour rather than discourage 
 this freedom and self-dependence and political 
 activity of the women. In present-day life it pretty 
 clearly is so. It is the Uranian classes of men, 
 or those at least who are touched with the Uranian 
 temperament, who chiefly support the modern 
 woman's movement. They, among the men, are 
 those who sympathise with the aspirations of women 
 towards liberty. The downright normal man with 
 whom the passion for the other sex is the dominant 
 note of life may love and care for his women- 
 kind; but it is generally with a proprietary sort 
 of love. He does not exactly want to see them 
 independent and self-determining of their fates. 
 It is the man in whom sex-polarity is not too pro- 
 nounced and dominant who looks for comradeship 
 in woman, and is glad to give her an equal foot- 
 ing with himself in social life. And so also was 
 it, perhaps, among some of these early and pre- 
 historic peoples of whom the Dorian traditions 
 and the Homeric poems give us a glimpse. 
 
 Certainly it is curious that the gradual fall of 
 the status of women in Greece from those early 
 days down to the 5th, 4th, and 3rd centuries, B.C., 
 when the position of the wife became that of a 
 domestic drudge, and her ideal was "to stay at 
 home and mind the house"* — that this fall was 
 
 •See The Greek View of Life, p. 161. 
 
 Ill 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 simultaneous with the gradual decline of the honouj 
 in which manly love was held, and its gradua 
 deterioration from a great civic institution intc 
 a mere personal pastime and indulgence. Th< 
 growth of civilisation (as has elsewhere beer 
 remarked) t had from the first the effect of accen 
 tuating the sex-passion. The luxurious selfishness 
 of men was stimulated in a way that led to tht 
 ultimate enslavement of women; and it is possible 
 that the simultaneous decay of the Uranian lovf 
 removed the one force which might have acted 
 in the opposite direction — namely, towards heroism 
 endurance, military and civic efficiency, and a 
 generous sense of comradeship towards the othei 
 sex. Curious, I say, that these two changes should 
 have gone on simultaneously, and suggestive ol 
 the question whether there may not be a neces- 
 sary connection between them. Curious, too, to 
 find that in our present-day civilisations where (till 
 quite recently) the position of women had reached 
 its lowest ebb, the Uranian attachment has simi- 
 larly been disowned and its healing influences 
 utterly ignored. 
 
 With regard to the general suggestion just made 
 that in very early times — bordering on the pre- 
 historic and matriarchal — love of a homosexual 01 
 Uranian kind had a far wider scope and acknow- 
 
 t Civilisation: its Cause and Cure, by E. Carpenter, p. 26. 
 112 
 
RELATION TO STATUS OF WOMAN 
 
 ledged place in social life than in later days, I 
 may, of course, refer to the earlier chapters in this 
 volume — which must anyhow convince us of the 
 immense ramifications and importance of the 
 impulse in primitive societies. And, with regard to 
 the special peoples we are dealing with in this 
 paper, it may be desirable here to point out that 
 this impulse among the early Greek peoples was 
 by no means confined to the men, but was active 
 and salient among the women also. Plutarch, in 
 his Lycurgus (c. 18), speaking of paiderastia among 
 the Spartans, says: — "This sort of love was so 
 much in fashion among them that the most staid 
 and virtuous matrons would own publicly their 
 passion to a modest and beautiful virgin."* The 
 loves of the Lesbian women and of Sappho 
 (b.c. 600) have been celebrated in all literature, and 
 have in modern times been treated with more 
 respect, perhaps, and understanding, than their 
 counterpart among Greek men. Bethe, in his 
 treatise cited above, says, speaking first of the 
 attachment among the Greek men: — "It is clear that 
 the Aeolian warriors in Lesbos about 600, B.C., 
 favored the same in their general admiration for 
 the Spartan ways, although in their poetry this 
 does not show itself very strongly. But the very close 
 alliances of women there — well-known in connec- 
 
 *Dacier's translation of Plutarch. 
 
 113 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 tion with Sappho — presuppose equally close bonds 
 among the men; just as these latter in Sparta had 
 their counterpart in feminine associations. "t And 
 in another passage, rebutting the contention that 
 these homosexual relations sprang from the seclu- 
 sion of the sexes from each other, he says : — "The 
 attempt breaks down utterly in face of the fact 
 that just in Sparta and Lesbos, where we know 
 most about this boy-love and girl-love, the sexes 
 to the best of our knowledge, mixed with each 
 other more freely than in the other Greek States." % 
 There appears to have been a curious custom 
 in Sparta, connected with the ordinary marriage 
 by capture, which may be mentioned here as sug- 
 gesting some wavering, so to speak, at that time, 
 of the line between male and female. "The bride- 
 groom," says Miiller,* "brought the young virgin, 
 having carried her off from the chorus of maidens 
 or elsewhere, to the bride's maid — who cut short 
 her hair, and left her lying in a man's dress and 
 shoes, without a light, on a bed of rushes; until 
 the bridegroom returning from the public supper, 
 carried the bride to the nuptial couch, and unloosed 
 her girdle." Whatever may have been the exact 
 meaning of this custom, it almost suggests that 
 
 tBethe, op. cit., p. 442. 
 tBethe, op. cit., p. 440. 
 
 *Op. cit., ii., 229. See also Plutarch's Lycurgus. ch. xv. 
 114 
 
RELATION TO STATUS OF WOMAN 
 
 marriage by capture of women was preceded by 
 marriage by capture of youths. 
 
 At any rate, it becomes quite clear, I think, 
 from all this that no extraneous explanation — about 
 the relative position of women, or the fortuitous 
 confusion of abstract friendship with mere sen- 
 sual passion — is needed in order to account for 
 the genesis of boy-love or comrade-love among 
 the Dorians, and the growth of this love into a 
 positive institution. It sprang quite naturally from 
 the temperament of the people — just as any one 
 nowadays may see it springing spontaneously, 
 though obscurely, in all classes of modern society, 
 and as it has sprung also at various times in the 
 past in Persia or Arabia or Japan, or among the 
 other peoples mentioned in the first essay in this 
 volume. In each of these cases it may have had 
 a different complexion and expression according 
 to the genius of the people concerned, in some it 
 may have been established as a civic or a military 
 institution, in others it may have fallen short of 
 this kind of recognition; but in all, I think, we 
 may say it has been a natural and not an artificial 
 racial outgrowth. In no case may it have been a 
 perfectly ideal thing, but almost always it has 
 been a positive, serious and deep-rooted impulse; 
 and the problem before each people has been 
 not to extinguish the impulse, but to turn it into 
 
 115 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 a great, publicly-recognised and honorable force 
 making for the welfare of the community. We 
 have seen in what way the Dorians solved this 
 problem. 
 
 116 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 RELATION TO CIVIC LIFE AND RELIGION 
 
 But more has to be said before the full scope 
 and character of the Dorian solution can be recog- 
 nised. It is quite in keeping with what we know 
 of the hardihood, public spirit, military prowess, 
 and so forth, of the Doric race, to find that in 
 this matter of love between an elder warrior and 
 a younger it was not the epithet koX6s which was 
 the coveted one, but ayaldbs — not to be "beautiful" 
 or "handsome," but to be "worthy," "brave," "ef- 
 ficient." This last was the decisive thing.* The 
 Athenian and other peoples, with greater refine- 
 ment and artistic sense, might worship beauty 
 and indulge in a kind of luxurious contempla- 
 tion of it; K a\6s b irais, "fair, fair is the youth," 
 is their constant refrain in epigram and inscrip- 
 tion; but to the Dorian it was valor, efficiency, 
 
 •See the quotation above (ch. v., p. 94) from Strabo: "They do 
 not regard as an object of affection a youth exceedingly handsome, 
 but him who is distinguished for courage and decorum {&vdpkuf ical 
 
 117 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 which drew his admiration. It is like the differ- 
 ence between the Doric architecture and that of 
 the Ionians or Corinthians. There is a certain 
 severity about the first-mentioned — an absolute adap- 
 tation to use, and freedom from superfluous 
 ornament. The sense of public life, in fact, and 
 of dedication to the common weal, was so strong 
 among the Dorians — as we see in many other ways 
 — that it deeply coloured their love-relations, and 
 gave the latter a scope and a purpose consider- 
 ably beyond that of personal gratification. The 
 normal marriage, as we have already seen, was 
 regulated in the interests of the State; and so 
 too, the love between men and youths, instead of 
 sinking as it did among some peoples into a dilet- 
 tante affair and matter of private indulgence, was 
 lifted into an important institution in the interests 
 of general education and militarism. The love 
 was not by any means — as a score of passages 
 show — a purely ideal or abstract sentiment; but 
 what is interesting to us is the splendour of the 
 result which was evolved out of its comparatively 
 coarse and sensual roots. 
 
 "The Dorians," says Bethe, "regulated the love- 
 relation of the man to the youth in fixed forms, 
 and dealt with it quite openly and with honor- 
 able seriousness, as deeming it an important insti- 
 tution under the agis of the Family, the Public, 
 118 
 
RELATION TO CIVIC LIFE 
 
 the State, and Religion. Everywhere among them 
 — in Sparta, Crete, Thebes, or wherever anything 
 more than the mere fact has come down to us — 
 we clearly discover that paiderastia was among 
 the ruling class the foundation of all training 
 towards hper^ (courage, virtue), in other words, 
 towards manly efficiency such as shows itself prin- 
 cipally in war, and the cultivation and preservation 
 of the same. For to a point beyond this some- 
 what narrow and mediaeval conception of virtue, the 
 Dorian States never attained, and could not well 
 attain, as long as their outlook on life remained. 
 The highest ethic and wisdom that Theognis had 
 to offer, he was fain to put into words of counsel 
 to a beloved youth who should be the inheritor of 
 his 6,ptTri ." 
 
 "In Sparta," he continues, "the lovers were so 
 far responsible for their loved ones that for any 
 dishonorable conduct of the latter they — not the 
 latter — were punished. And it was the lover, as 
 well as the youth's relatives, who represented the 
 beloved in all affairs in the Agora — to which 
 indeed the latter was not admitted till his 30th 
 year. So that in fact the Erastes is put legally on 
 an equal footing with the father and elder 
 brothers of the Eromenos — indeed, even above 
 them, since he bears a responsibility for him 
 which the latter's family does not undertake." 
 
 119 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 Speaking further of the custom of placing lover- 
 pairs together in the battle-ranks, Professor Bethe 
 says that the reason for this is obvious: — "Any 
 conduct that was not in accordance with the 
 chivalric sense of honour was barred on the one 
 hand by the anxiety of the man to be a model to 
 his beloved of true dperij, and no less by the latter's 
 consciousness of his duty to show himself worthy 
 of his lover." And then he quotes the well-known 
 words of Phsdrus in Plato's Banquet: — "I say, then, 
 that if a man who loves should be discovered 
 doing anything dishonourable or through fear suf- 
 fering the same without resistance, he would not 
 be so shamed or pained before his own father or 
 companions, or any one else, as before his beloved 
 youth. And we see the same with regard to the 
 youth, that he throws disgrace especially on his lovers 
 when he is discovered in any dishonour." 
 
 J. Addington Symonds has a very interesting 
 essay,* in which he compares the love-ideal of 
 medieval and feudal Europe with that of ancient 
 Greece. Both loves became recognised and ac- 
 cepted institutions, and both had the same social 
 purpose, namely the formation of the perfect 
 knight — the embodiment of honour and bravery. 
 But in the first case it was the devotion to one 
 
 *The Dantesque and Platonic Ideals of Love, in the Key of Blue 
 (John Lane, 1893). 
 120 
 
RELATION TO CIVIC LIFE 
 
 fair lady — and through her to all the suffering 
 and oppressed women-kind; and in the second case 
 it was devotion to some youth, and through 
 him to the whole commonwealth — which led to this 
 result. In both cases the love was apart from 
 and outside of ordinary matrimony. The mediaeval 
 knight might be duly married, but what inspired 
 his romance and heroism was worship of some 
 lady — who was probably the wife of another; and 
 the Dorian knight no doubt had a wife and children 
 at home, but the love which spurred him to his 
 deeds of bravery was for the younger comrade 
 who stood beside him in the ranks. The direct 
 incitements were, in both cases, the same. "Just 
 as in the 12th and 13th centuries," says Bethe, 
 "the lady sends her warrior suitor from one love- 
 ordeal to another, so does Konon tell of a Cretan 
 youth (Leucocomas, he calls him) who tests his 
 lover (Promachos) with great and dangerous en- 
 counters. Such stories are not by any means later 
 growths; they were the commonly accepted view 
 of the matter in the 5th century, B.C., certainly 
 in the 6th. For the contemporaries of Aeschylus 
 and Pindar were hardly able to think of warrior- 
 pairs like Achilles and Patroclus, Theseus and 
 Peirithous, Herakles and Iolaus, otherwise than as 
 pairs of lovers." 
 
 Thus it was largely for the purpose of spreading 
 
 121 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 a high standard of public honour, bravery, and ef- 
 ficiency, that military comradeship was encouraged 
 among the Dorians. It worked powerfully among 
 the boys and youths, who aspired to become 
 men, and especially to be loved by some heroic 
 warrior; * and it had a deep influence on the men, 
 who (referring again to the extract from Strabo) 
 would be well received by the boy's relations if 
 of good name and fame, but rejected if "un- 
 worthy." Remembering that the Dorian polity was 
 an aristocracy, in which families of good name 
 and tradition had a great sway, we see how it was 
 that to become the irapaorATijs or squire of a well- 
 known warrior, was to become at once KXeww or 
 distinguished, to wear a distinctive dress, and to 
 pass into a good social position; while on the other 
 hand, for a man to have his advances towards a 
 youth refused by the relations was to suffer the 
 deepest of insults. 
 
 We have thus seen that the education of the 
 youths, the honour and fair name of the men, ef- 
 ficiency in battle, and the safety of the State were 
 all involved in the Dorian Custom of military com- 
 radeship. It is needless, therefore, to remark that 
 religion was also involved; for in the old pagan world 
 every great social custom was identified with or sanc- 
 tioned by religion. 
 
 •See Aelian 7, iii., 12 — who says that the Spartan boys would beg 
 a man iuntviiv durots. 
 
 122 
 
RELATION TO CIVIC LIFE 
 
 With regard to this point the remarkable investi- 
 gations of Hiller von Gaertringen, a few years ago 
 in the island of Thera, in the iEgean Sea, yield 
 important evidence. As we have already said, the 
 Dorians on their immigration settled not only in 
 various parts of Greece, but in the islands of 
 the iEgean and in Crete. One of these islands 
 was Thera (or Santorin), and it became an impor- 
 tant centre — a holy place and resort of the Dorian 
 tribes, with temples and dancing and running 
 grounds.* At some early period it had been occu- 
 pied by the Phoenicians; but Strabo calls it "a colony 
 of the Lacedaemonians, and the mother-city of 
 the Cyrenians;" and there seems little doubt that 
 it was colonised from Sparta, and that afterwards 
 it sent out a colony to Cyrene in Africa. As this 
 latter event took place about 630 B.C., it seems 
 probable that the former was not later than 700 
 B.C. Here, then, on one hill on this island are 
 the remains of temples and holy places — sacred 
 to Apollo (Karneios and Delphinios), to Zeus, 
 Athena, Artemis, and others; and close at hand 
 an old circular structure and a natural cavern, 
 "both of which were later united by the Gymna- 
 sium-building, and were clearly at that early period 
 dedicated to the Dorian athletic exercises and 
 
 •See Thera, by Hiller von Gaertringen (3 vols., Berlin, 1899). 
 
 123 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 dances of youths." * Less than a stone's throw 
 from these, on the side of the sacred mountain 
 itself, are (as Hiller found and copied) a quantity 
 of very archaic inscriptions, at least as old as the 
 7th century, B.C., deeply chiselled in the rock 
 (as it were for all time) in letters four to six 
 inches long, and celebrating the names and the be- 
 trothals of comrades. f We are accustomed, in the 
 modern world, to see love-inscriptions on tress and 
 even rocks, of feminine names; but here we have 
 the names of youths and men. Let us give Hiller's 
 own words :f — "At first we find the simple names, 
 like Aglon, Maisiadas, Kikinnios, Arasimandros, 
 Biaios, Euryteles, Tharres, and many another. 
 But soon we find the same with additions: 'Mon- 
 iadas is the first' — 'Ainesis was brought up by 
 the Graces' — 'So and so is good, so and so is 
 good (dYa06s).' " 
 
 Leaving Hiller for a moment, it is interesting 
 to see here, what we noticed before, the admiration 
 of this people for "goodness," valour, efficiency, 
 rather than for beauty. The epithet ko\6s in this 
 collection hardly appears more than once, but the 
 epithet &ya$6s over and over again, sometimes 
 alone, as Laqudidas agathos or Teiekrates agathos, 
 
 *Bethe, p. 450. 
 
 tSee for these, H. von Gaertringen, I. G., xii., 3, 536-601, etc. 
 XThera, vol. Hi., p. 67 et seq. 
 124 
 
RELATION TO CIVIC LIFE 
 
 sometimes in praise of their dancing, as: — Bap0a£ 
 op/cheiTcu re ayaBos, or 'Evtirj'Kos apiaros opKhearas. 
 
 Continuing, then, Hiller says: — "But presently 
 the inscriptions speak more plainly. We find not 
 only praise of the best dancer, but also direct 
 evidence of the love of youth in quite sensual 
 form — over which later ages sought to draw a 
 veil. For evidence of this, I refer to the classic 
 examples, I.G. xii., 3, 536-540. They prove to us 
 the rude habits of the Dorian settlers, and they 
 show also their total absence of prudery, and an en- 
 tirely different sentiment on these subjects from what 
 afterwards prevailed." 
 
 Among the examples referred to are for instance 
 536, saying that Pheidippidas was united to Tima- 
 goras, or 537 (also quoted by Bethe), saying: — 
 "Here in these sacred precincts, with invocation of 
 the Delphinian, Krimon was united to the son 
 of Bathycles." * In the latter, the solemn appeal 
 to the Delphinian Apollo (vai rov Ae\Tht.vwv) assures 
 us of the religious character of the betrothal; and 
 others of the inscriptions contain similar dedica- 
 tions. Hiller himself says: — "Of the various lovers 
 
 * nh«Si?rcri8as uiwhe Ti/iayopas, and Nat tov AeXirhieKW ho 
 Kplfuav reiSe w«rhe iraida BafliwXeos. These inscriptions are 
 in an archaic script which cannot exactly be reproduced here, but 
 the readings given are as near as available in the later alphabet — 
 a modern "h" being used for the old Greek aspirate. 
 
 125 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 one invokes Apollo, f another Delphinios — that is 
 Apollo again — as witness that he has fulfilled his 
 proper duty." 
 
 Ordinary marriage between man and woman has, 
 of course, in all ages and among most peoples, 
 been made a religious institution, and has been cere- 
 monially sealed in the presence of the deity and 
 with the invocation of his name — as in our Chris- 
 tian churches; but it is strange to find here a 
 similar ritual between men. Yet, as a matter of 
 fact, even to-day, in Albania, and under the pro- 
 tection of the Greek Church, something of the kind 
 — as already mentioned — continues. Hahn, in his 
 Albanesische Studien, says that the Dorian customs 
 of comradeship still flourish in Albania "just as 
 described by the ancients," and are closely entwined 
 with the whole life of the people. (The elder 
 lover instructs and, when necessary, reproves the 
 younger, follows him jealously about, fights duels 
 on his behalf, protects him, makes him presents 
 of various kinds, and so forth.) And he describes, 
 in some detail, the church ceremonial attending the 
 
 tWith regard to this invocation of Apollo, see above, ch. i., page 
 27. Apollo was the special god of comradeship; as Delphinios he 
 was the source of divination; as Karneios he links on to the Syrian 
 Ashteroth Karnaim, the feminine principle. Nor must it be forgot- 
 ten that Thera had already been at an earlier date a Phoenician or 
 Syrian colony, and that here was a point of contact between the 
 Dorian and the Syrian festivals. 
 126 
 
RELATION TO CIVIC LIFE 
 
 brotherhood-union of two men. And Dr. P. 
 Naecke, reporting * information received from Al- 
 bania, says: — "The Skipetars (North Albanians) 
 entertain for handsome youths a quite enthusiastic 
 love. Their passion and jealousy is so strong that 
 even to-day sometimes a case of suicide on that 
 account will occur. . . . Further, it is quite true 
 that the brotherhood-unions when taking place are 
 blessed by the priests — the two partners sharing 
 the Eucharist immediately after. With the Turks 
 the ceremony is different. My landlord (a Chris- 
 tian) in Ochrida sealed blood-brotherhood with an 
 Albanian Moslem (Gega). The two made inci- 
 sion in each other's fingers, and sucked drops of 
 each other's blood. Henceforth one must stand by 
 the other in life and death; and for the Christian 
 landlord that is a valuable guarantee." 
 
 The latter part of this passage is interesting as 
 showing how in Albania, though the blood-brother- 
 hoods may be sanctified by some kind of religious 
 ceremonial, they still in some cases overpass the 
 ordinary religious barriers — as between Christian and 
 Turk. And Hahn, again, in his book, says that 
 religious differences do not form a bar. The Turk 
 loves the Christian, and the Christian the Turk, 
 and many a Christian has gone over to Islam be- 
 
 *In the Jahrbuch fiir Sexuelle Zviisckenstufen, vol. ix., p. 328. 
 
 127 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 cause his beloved had promised, on this condition, 
 to be subject to him. 
 
 Here then, it would seem, at Thera there was a 
 celebrated holy place and rendezvous of the Doric 
 race, f and hither, at festival periods, crowds would 
 come; — comrade-pairs would ratify their alliances in 
 the temple-precincts, and lovers would inscribe the 
 names of their beloved on the rocks. 
 
 If this was the case at Thera, would there not 
 be other places, we may ask, where similar cere- 
 monies took place? And Professor Bethe, with 
 great plausibility, suggests that there were. "I 
 do not doubt," he says,* "that starting from the 
 above solid evidence we can also interpret that 
 
 tThera, in fact, occupied for the Dorian Greeks much the same 
 position as Delos did for the Ionians: of which Mr. H. B. Cotter ill 
 (Ancient Greece, p. 152) says, "This island, lying in the midst of the 
 Cyclades, which offer easy transit between Greece and Ionia, was 
 in early times an important entrepot. It was also the religious center 
 of the Ionian world, famed as the birthplace of Artemis and Apollo 
 and for the most ancient oracle of the god. Every fifth year the 
 birth of the twin deities was celebrated with magnificence amid a 
 great concourse, vividly described in the ancient Hymn to Apollo: 
 'Hither gather the long-robed Ionians with their children and chaste 
 wives. They wrestle, they dance, they sing, in memory of the god. 
 He who saw them would say they were immortal and ageless, so 
 much grace and charm would he find in viewing the men, the fair- 
 girdled women, the swift ships, and riches of every kind.' These 
 festivals seem to have been accompanied by contests in music and 
 poetry." 
 
 *Bethe, op. cit., p. 450. 
 128 
 
RELATION TO CIVIC LIFE 
 
 custom of the Thebans which lingered still in Aris- 
 totle's time, and attracted his attention. 'On the 
 grave of the hero Iolaus,' he wrote, 'lovers and 
 their beloved youths still pledge their troth with one 
 another ;' t and Plutarch adds : 'because Iolaus was 
 the favorite of Heracles, and for that reason 
 took part in his battles as his squire.' In 
 Thebes no doubt at that time folk would be sat- 
 isfied with a festal symbolical ceremony, corre- 
 sponding to betrothal before divine witnesses. But 
 originally in Thebes, even as in Thera, the act 
 must have been carried out right on the holy 
 place in the presence of the heroic prototype and 
 patron of comrade-love. To understand the mean- 
 ing of the name, The Sacred Band, from the sacred- 
 ness of these comrade-alliances is now easy." Fur- 
 ther he suggests that the competition which yearly 
 took place among the youths at the tomb of the 
 great hero and lover, Diodes, in Megara — and 
 which is known to us through Theocritus (Idyll xii.) 
 — had a similar origin; and represented the sur- 
 vival of actual betrothals which once were celebrated 
 there, as at a holy place. 
 
 There is certainly something very grand about 
 this whole conception and manifestation of the 
 Uranian love among the Dorians. The wonderful 
 stories — treasured in the hearts of the Greek peoples 
 
 tSee Plutarch's Pelopidas, ch. xviii. 
 
 129 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 for centuries — of heroic bravery and mutual devotion 
 inspired by it; the high seriousness with which it 
 was cultivated both as a political safeguard and 
 as a means of the education of youth, the religious 
 sanction and dedication to the gods, and withal the 
 absolute recognition of its human and passional ori- 
 gin, cannot fail to make us feel that here was a 
 great people with a unique message for the world. 
 Certainly we shall never in modern times under- 
 stand this love until we realise this quality of it 
 and its immense capabilities. 
 
 The modern peoples, it must be said, seem to 
 have a strangely low estimate of love in general. 
 Even the quite normal love between man and wife 
 — though recognised as the foundation of the fam- 
 ily, and contributing somewhat to the education 
 of children — does not often figure as an inspira- 
 tion to political life or to public service; and 
 certainly, in the public mind, has no great asso- 
 ciation with religion. Indeed the physical circum- 
 stances of marriage are generally looked upon as 
 repugnant to religion, and the sexual relation be- 
 tween man and woman as in itself unclean, and by 
 no means to be thought of in connection with a 
 church or other consecrated place or the divinity 
 that may dwell there. Yet we know that this low 
 estimate has not by any means been universal. It 
 seems to mark a certain period, and to charac- 
 130 
 
RELATION TO CIVIC LIFE 
 
 terise certain races in the evolution of humanity. 
 The Jewish peoples — perhaps by way of protest and 
 reaction against the excesses of the surrounding 
 Syrian tribes — insisted on a complete divorce be- 
 tween sex and religion; and that alienation of the 
 two has lasted on down the Christian centuries. 
 But in much of the old pagan world it was just 
 the contrary. Sexual rituals were an intimate part 
 of religion; and the wonder and glory of sex were 
 a recognised manifestation of divinity. In India 
 even to-day I believe, ordinary marriages are 
 sometimes consummated within the temple-precincts; 
 women who wish for children pay their respects 
 in a very practical way to the lingams or phallic 
 emblems in the sacred cloisters, just as they did 
 in earlier times to the priests themselves, repre- 
 senting the gods; and the devadasis, or girls who 
 dance before the divinities, are still treated with 
 honour and a certain reverence, though their sexual 
 functions in connection with the temple services, 
 dating from thousands of years back (but now 
 largely discontinued), are well-known. In the 
 temples of Syria, and in other cases — some of which 
 have just been touched upon in the first paper in 
 this volume — a similar rapprochement between sex 
 and religion existed. 
 
 In all these cases it has been the usual criticism 
 of the votaries of Christianity to say that this con- 
 
 I3i 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 nection or rapprochement only proves how unworthy 
 and debased and merely sensual the religions of 
 the old world were. But does this conclusion fol- 
 low? Doubtless in cases these worships were un- 
 worthy and debased. But would not the argu- 
 ment be equally valid if it were said that our 
 conclusion that religion was soiled by its contact 
 with sex only proves how unclean our conception 
 of sex is? In the Upanishads of India — a series 
 of writings, which perhaps show the high-water- 
 mark of the religious sense in any age of the 
 world — the perfectly naive, direct and open way 
 in which the physical facts of human love are 
 brought into direct touch with the supreme inspira- 
 tion of the religious consciousness affords to us 
 a profound lesson, which we should do well to bear 
 in mind. In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad — one 
 of the finest of the Upanishads — there is a pas- 
 sage in which instruction is given to the man who 
 desires a noble son as to the prayers which he shall 
 offer to the gods on the occasion of congress with 
 his wife. In simple and serene language it directs 
 him how — "when he has placed his virile member 
 in the body of his wife, and joined his mouth to 
 her mouth," he should pray to the various forms 
 of deity who preside over the operations of nature: 
 to Vishnu to prepare the womb of the future 
 mother, to Prajapati to watch over the influx of 
 132 
 
RELATION TO CIVIC LIFE 
 
 the semen, and to the other gods to nourish the 
 foetus, etc.* How far all this seems from the 
 modern mind, how alien, how profane ! 
 
 Yet the gross details of physical union were 
 obviously not unclean to the writers of this and 
 similar passages in the Upanishads. There is 
 indeed, for instance, not a little reason for think- 
 ing that many of the early peoples regarded the 
 semen as the vehicle and special condensation of 
 the soul.f The soul was transferred to the woman, 
 perhaps for re-embodiment in the child, perhaps 
 for union with and reinforcement of her soul. 
 
 And it must be confessed that in view of all the 
 conclusions of modern thought and science, such 
 a theory, if not by any means to be considered 
 valid or even adequate, does at any rate appear 
 a natural and not impossible one. To such people, 
 then, the so-called physical union was in very 
 truth and reality a sacred affair taking place in 
 the presence of the gods, and vouched for by the 
 amazing inspiration and revelation of the passion 
 of love itself. 
 
 And leaving aside this special theory with regard 
 to the semen; we to-day can see that in the more 
 subtle and refined intimacies of lovers in caresses 
 and embraces, and in the silent influences of mere 
 
 *See Love's Coming of Age, by E. Carpenter, p. 17. 
 tSee Bethe, op. cit., p. 464 et seq. 
 
 133 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 presence and nearness, there do pass over from 
 one to the other elements of character, shades of 
 feeling and disposition, and something indeed of 
 the nature of the soul. That well-known and fine 
 epigram of Plato conveys this very idea: — 
 
 "Thee as I kist, behold! on my lips my own soul was trem- 
 bling; 
 
 For, bold one, she had come, meaning to find her way 
 through." 
 
 And yet, strangely enough, while this is recog- 
 nised, there is little sense in modern times of the 
 sacredness of love, even in its most gracious forms, 
 nor any inclination to connect it with religion. 
 The marvellous and mysterious process by which 
 the soul, the very inner being, of one person passes 
 over and transfuses that of another, seems to be 
 passed by or treated as something unworthy. How 
 vulgar — if one may use the word — is our current 
 conception of these subjects I 
 
 However, with the modern world — except for the 
 purpose of illustrating certain points — we are not 
 here concerned. The point which I wish especially 
 to illuminate is that love in its more serious aspects 
 was recognised in the old world as having influ- 
 ences on character so deep and solemn that they 
 brought it into close touch with religion. We 
 have seen in the Dorian institution that the love 
 between a man and a youth was largely encour- 
 134 
 
RELATION TO CIVIC LIFE 
 
 aged on this very ground — of the communication 
 of character, virtue, dperi}. For a valiant warrior 
 not to have a youth attached to him as squire or 
 favorite was disgraceful, or even punishable, 
 because so the contagion and inheritance of his 
 valour would be lost.* We have seen above, in 
 the account of Ephorus in Strabo, that the rela- 
 tives would enquire most closely about the honour 
 and bravery of such a lover before surrendering 
 their boy to him. On the other hand, Plutarch, 
 in his Lycurgus (c. 18), says: — "It is a thing 
 remarkable that their lovers had a share in the 
 young lad's honour or disgrace: and there goes a 
 story that one of them was fined by the magistrates, 
 because the lad whom he loved cried out effemi- 
 nately as he was fighting. . . . And though several 
 men's fancies met in one person, yet did not this 
 cause any strangeness or jealousy among them, 
 but was rather the beginning of a very intimate 
 friendship, whilst they all jointly conspired to ren- 
 der the belov'd boy the most accomplished in the 
 world." 
 
 Such a contagion and identification of the sense 
 of honour between two persons could obviously only 
 come about through a deep and heroic love 
 between them; and when such love ramified widely, 
 as indicated in the last quotation, from one to 
 
 *See Aelian 8, iii. 10. 
 
 135 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 another through the land, and when the stand- 
 ard of honour concerned was the welfare of the 
 country — then clearly the "soul" transmitted by 
 means of the love-relation was not merely the soul 
 of any one individual concerned, but was the Soul 
 of the People — that is, in other words, the inspira- 
 tion of their religion. 
 
 How far the primitive Dorians, beneath their 
 strange customs and quasi-religious rites, may have 
 had an inkling of this truth, it might be difficult 
 to say. Probably no very reasoned perception of 
 it, but rather a kind of sub-conscious intuition. 
 Anyhow, the love-customs of a people whose career 
 was so splendid, and who exercised such a pro- 
 found influence upon the other Greek peoples, and 
 so on the rest of the world, cannot but be deeply 
 interesting to us moderns — despite such elements 
 of crudeness and barbarism as are certainly to be 
 found among them. 
 
 136 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE SAMURAI OF JAPAN : AND THEIR 
 IDEAL 
 
 The Samurai of Japan afford another instance of 
 the part played by the Uranian love in a nation's 
 life, and of its importance; and what we know of 
 their institutions resembles in many respects those 
 of the Dorian Greeks which we have just de- 
 scribed. This Order of Knighthood, as it may be 
 called, was the ruling element of Japanese life 
 during six or seven centuries, from 1200 a.d. on- 
 wards; and it was only in 1870 or so, with the 
 introduction of the new Constitution, that it was 
 dissolved — though its code of personal honour and 
 of social service, under the name Bushido, still 
 has a large, almost a national, following. 
 
 Of late years much has been written about the 
 Samurai; and their high tradition of chivalry, 
 their spartan simplicity of life, their bravery, their 
 loyalty, and dedication to the service of their 
 country and its Mikado, are matters of common 
 knowledge. 
 
 137 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 Lafcadio Hearn, in his Japan: an Interpretation 
 (p. 264, et seq.), tells us that, in the period we 
 are speaking of, Japan, emerging from an earlier 
 and looser tribal state, "was still but a great 
 aggregate of clans and sub-clans kept together 
 by military coercion. At the head of this vast 
 aggregate was the Heavenly Sovereign, the Living 
 God of the race — Priest-Emperor and Pontiff 
 Supreme — representing the oldest dynasty in the 
 world. Next to him stood the Kuge, or ancient 
 nobility, descendants of emperors and of gods. . . . 
 Next to the Kuge ranked the Buke, or military 
 class. But the difference in most cases between the 
 lords and the warriors of the Buke was a difference 
 of rank based upon income and title: all alike 
 were Samurai." He further explains that — "In 
 early times the head of the military class was 
 appointed by the Emperor, only as a temporary 
 Commander-in-chief; afterwards these commanders- 
 in-chief, by usurpation of power, made their office 
 hereditary, and became veritable Imperatores in 
 the Roman sense. Their title of Shogun is well- 
 known to Western readers. The Shogun ruled 
 over between two and three hundred lords (Daimyo: 
 plural) of provinces or districts, whose powers and 
 privileges varied according to income and grade. 
 . . . Before that time each lord exercised supreme 
 rule over his own domain; and it is not surprising 
 138 
 
THE SAMURAI OF JAPAN 
 
 that the Jesuit missionaries, as well as the early 
 Dutch and English traders, should have called the 
 Daimyo 'Kings.' . . . The great Daimyo had their 
 greater and lesser vassals; and each of these again 
 had his force of trained Samurai or fighting 
 gentry." There was also a particular class of sol- 
 dier-farmers called Goshi — something like our 
 yeomen. 
 
 Thus with the various grades and ranks of 
 Samurai their total number was about two millions, 
 and they were exempted from taxation and privi- 
 leged each to wear two swords. "Such in brief 
 outline was the general ordination of those noble 
 and military classes by whom the nation was ruled 
 with great severity. The bulk of the common 
 people were divided into three classes : farmers, 
 artisans, and merchants." 
 
 In the book, Btfshido, the Soul of Japan* by 
 Inazo Nitobe, which during the last ten years has 
 had a large circulation, an interesting account is 
 given of the moral and social ideal of these 
 Samurai. The author explains that Bu-shi or Bu-ke 
 means Fighting Knight; and so Bushido means 
 literally Military-Knight ways — the ways that fight- 
 ing nobles should observe in their daily life as 
 well as in their vocation; in a word, the "Precepts 
 of Knighthood," the noblesse oblige of the warrior 
 
 * Simpkin and Marshall, 2/6. 
 
 139 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 class. . . . "Bushido, then," he continues, "is the 
 code of moral principles which the knights were 
 required or instructed to observe. It is not a 
 written code; at best, it consists of a few maxims 
 handed down from mouth to mouth, or coming 
 from the pen of some well-known warrior or savant. 
 ... It was founded not on the creation of one 
 brain, however able, or on the life of a single 
 personage, however renowned. It was an organic 
 growth of decades and centuries of military career. 
 ... As in England the political institutions of 
 feudalism may be said to date from the Norman 
 Conquest, so we may say that in Japan its rise was 
 simultaneous with the ascendancy of Yoritomo, 
 late in the 12th century. As, however, in England 
 we find the social elements of feudalism far back 
 in the period previous to William the Conqueror, 
 so, too, the germs of feudalism in Japan had been 
 long existent before the period I have mentioned. 
 . . . Coming to possess great honour and great 
 privileges, and correspondingly great responsi- 
 bilities, they, the Fighting Knights, soon felt the 
 need of a common standard of behaviour, espe- 
 cially as they were always on a belligerent footing 
 and belonged to different clans." 
 
 Mr. Inazo Nitobe then goes on to report, in some 
 detail, this common standard of conduct which 
 inspired the Samurai; and it need hardly be said 
 140 
 
THE SAMURAI OF JAPAN 
 
 that he describes it as of fine and heroic quality. 
 Rectitude, justice, courage, endurance, and abso- 
 lute readiness to die for duty — these were virtues 
 inculcated from childhood onwards with a kind 
 of Spartan insistence. "To rush into the thick of 
 battle and be slain in it, is easy enough, and a 
 common churl is equal to that task; but to live 
 when it is right to live, and to die only when it 
 is right to die — that is true courage. What Samurai 
 youth has not heard of 'Great Valor' and of the 
 'Valor of a Villein!'" 
 
 Simplicity of life again, and contempt of money; 
 the high sense of honour which prompted "Happy 
 Dispatch," or Haraktri, rather than suffer the least 
 disgrace; these were all characteristics which relate 
 them to the early Spartans. For the Samurai 
 commerce and the vulgar seeking of gain was 
 forbidden. Only x in the form of farming was any- 
 thing of the kind allowed. Yet with all this stern- 
 ness of life the finer arts were not neglected. As 
 the older people, the Dorians, had their music 
 and dancing and poetry, and their contests of 
 wit, which were specially encouraged among the 
 young folk, so it was with the Samurai. "In 
 the principality of Satsuma, noted for its martial 
 spirit and education, the custom prevailed for 
 young men to practise music; not the blast of 
 trumpets, or the beat of drums, but sad and tender 
 
 141 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 melodies on the biwa, soothing our fiery spirits 
 and drawing our thoughts away from scent of 
 blood and scenes of carnage. Polybius tells us 
 of the Constitution of Arcadia, which required 
 all youths under thirty to practise music, in order 
 that this gentle art might alleviate the rigors of 
 the inclement region. It is to its influence that he 
 attributes the absence of cruelty in that part of 
 the Arcadian mountains." * 
 
 In this connection it may be mentioned that 
 Mr. Lowes Dickinson, in a letter from Japan 
 (Manchester Guardian, 12th Sept., 1913), insists 
 upon the remarkable combination of the masculine 
 and the feminine in the Japanese character — of the 
 sensitiveness to beauty with heroic endurance and 
 courage. He says: — "Northerners, and Anglo- 
 Saxons in particular, have always at the back of 
 their minds a notion that there is something 
 effeminate about the sense for beauty . . . but 
 history gives the lie to this complacent theory. 
 No nations were ever more virile than the Greeks or 
 Italians: they have left a mark on the world which 
 will endure when Anglo-Saxon civilisation is for- 
 gotten. And none have been, or are, more virile 
 than the Japanese. That they have also the delicacy 
 of women does not alter the fact." 
 
 The author of Bushido also points out that among 
 
 *Bushido, p. 26. 
 142 
 
THE SAMURAI OF JAPAN 
 
 the Japanese Fighting Knights the study of letters 
 and poetry was common. "Everybody of any edu- 
 cation was either a poet or a poetaster. Not infre- 
 quently a marching soldier might be seen to halt, 
 take his writing utensils from his belt, and compose 
 an ode — and such papers were found afterwards in 
 the helmets or the breastplates when these were 
 removed from their lifeless wearers." 
 
 How all these details — and among them the incul- 
 cation of good manners, and of mercy to the weak 
 or distressed, must not be forgotten — remind us of 
 our own period of chivalry in the West ! Truly 
 Mr. Inazo Nitobe has given us an interesting pic- 
 ture; and if, as one seems to find, the picture is 
 all lights and no shadows, doubtless this is because 
 he is painting the ideal of the case rather than 
 the actuality. For the latter, or for phases of the 
 latter, Mitford's Tales of Old Japan should, of 
 course, be consulted. What the author of Bushido 
 impresses on us with great force is that this ideal 
 became the root of Japanese life. As the figure 
 of the gentle-man, the perfect knight sans peur et 
 sans reproche emerged from our Feudal era, so 
 the ideal of Bushido emerged from the feudal era 
 of Japan. "What Japan was she owed to the 
 Samurai; they were not only the flower of the 
 nation, but the root as well . . . the innumerable 
 avenues of popular amusement and instruction — 
 
 143 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 the theatres, the story-tellers' booths, the preachers' 
 dais, the musical recitations, the novels — have taken 
 for their chief theme the stories of the Samurai. 
 The peasants round the open fire in their huts 
 never tire of repeating the achievements of Yoshit- 
 sune * and his faithful retainer Benkei, or of the two 
 brave Soga brothers; the dusky urchins listen with 
 gaping mouths until the last stick burns out and 
 the fire dies in its embers, still leaving their hearts 
 aglow with the tale that is told. . . . Samurai grew 
 to be the beau-ideal of the whole race. 'As among 
 flowers the cherry is queen, so among men the 
 Samurai is lord.' Debarred from commercial pur- 
 suits the military class itself did not aid commerce; 
 but there was no channel of human activity, no 
 avenue of thought, which did not receive in some 
 measures an impetus from Bushido. Intellectual 
 and moral Japan was directly or indirectly the 
 work of knighthood." f 
 
 There is only one fault to be found with this 
 
 •Yoshitsune was brother to Yoritomo (above mentioned), who 
 was one of the first and most renowned of the Samurai. Yoshitsune 
 and his retainer Benkei were inseparable, and together they performed 
 such feats of heroism that Yoritomo became jealous of their fame, 
 and tried to chase them from the land. Adopting many disguises 
 and in constant peril of their lives they wandered far and passed 
 through many adventures, till at last they died together in a wild 
 country in the North of Japan. 
 
 ^Bushido, pp. 107, 108. 
 144 
 
THE SAMURAI OF JAPAN 
 
 charmingly written book of Inazo Nitobe's — but 
 it is a serious one. He tells us that Bushido was 
 the root of Japanese social life, but he does not 
 tell us what was the root of Bushido. The Samurai 
 ideal is a noble one, but, in his account of it, it 
 is something up in the air — it does not touch the 
 ground anywhere. In no passage does he tell us 
 from what great human emotion it sprang, or 
 what it was that through all those centuries held 
 the elements of Bushido together. He indicates 
 (see pp. 7 and 123) that its source was not in reli- 
 gion, for though Shintoism played a large part 
 in Bushido, Mr. Nitobe regards religion as only 
 one of its elements; and so we are left in doubt 
 as to where the ideal really rooted. 
 
 And yet there ought not to be any doubt. We 
 have seen in the Dorian Chivalry that whatever 
 elements of religion, of morality, of patriotism there 
 were about it, they were brought to a focus by 
 the personal relation — in that case the love of a 
 man for the youth that fought at his side; or 
 rather their mutual love for each other. It was 
 love that gave life and actuality to the ideal — 
 for the youth to see the glory of Knighthood in 
 the man, for the man to train the youth into an 
 embodiment of his vision. And in the Chivalry of 
 Mediaeval Europe it was much the same: only 
 there the love was that of a Knight for his Lady — or 
 
 145 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 their mutual love of each other; the lady to hold 
 out an image and a symbol of perfection, and 
 the knight to make himself worthy at every point 
 of the light in his lady's eyes — for her sake to care 
 more for his honour than his life. Probably where- 
 ever there has been a great and inspiring ideal 
 of this kind actually moving among a people, there 
 has lain at or very near the root of it that won- 
 derful thing, human love; so individual, so human, 
 and yet so close and vital to the very soul of the 
 race. 
 
 Certainly it was so among the Samurai of Japan. 
 The love and devotion of the retainer towards his 
 lord runs like a golden thread through the his- 
 tory of that land; and how intensely personal 
 that devotion might be is illustrated by scores of 
 stories, like the story of the Forty-seven Ronins, or 
 that above mentioned of Yoshitsune and Ben- 
 kei. But beyond that, and perhaps even deeper 
 and more personal, runs the love between com- 
 rades of the same grade, generally but not neces- 
 sarily an elder and a younger. And here certainly 
 is a point of close resemblance between the chivalry 
 of the Samurai and the chivalry of the Dorians. 
 It was not so much the fair lady of his dreams, 
 or even the wife and family at home, that formed 
 the rallying point of the Samurai's heroism and 
 loyalty, but the younger comrade whom he loved 
 146 
 
THE SAMURAI OF JAPAN 
 
 and who was his companion-at-arms. In Mitford's 
 Tales of Old Japan this motive shows but slightly. 
 But in the case of that book — excellent as it is in its 
 way — it is easy to see from the mode of its produc- 
 tion, the tales being selected for British consump- 
 tion and more or less re-cast, of course, in the 
 telling, that the theme which interests us here is 
 comparatively neglected. One must go to the 
 Japanese authors and storytellers themselves — as I 
 shall do presently — to show the matter in its true 
 light. 
 
 Mr. Suyewo-Iwaya, of Tokio, in an article on 
 Comrade-Love in Japan, says*: — "From 1200 a.d. 
 onwards the Samurai became prominent in Japan. 
 To them it seemed more manly and heroic that 
 men should love men and consort with them, than 
 to give themselves over to women. For several 
 centuries this view had sway far and wide. Almost 
 every knight sought out a youth who should be 
 worthy of him, and consolidated with such youth 
 a close blood-brotherhood. It often happened that 
 on account of the beloved one the knight would 
 become involved in an affair of jealousy or a duel. 
 It one reads Nanshok-Oka garni (a series of tales on 
 this subject by Saikak, a celebrated novelist of 
 the 17th century) one will find plenty of stories of 
 
 •In the Jahrbuch fiir homosexuelle Z<wischenstufen, vol. iv. (1902), 
 p. 265 et seq. 
 
 147 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 this sort. Thus the relation remained at first only 
 between knights and knightlings (so they called 
 the favorites), but afterwards it became more 
 general." Further, the same author says: — "It 
 is also remarkable that this kind of love is not 
 known to the same degree in all the provinces of 
 Japan. It seems that it has spread more widely 
 in the Southern part than in the Northern provinces. 
 There are regions where the general public knows 
 nothing of it. On the other hand, in Kyushu, and 
 especially in Satsuma, it is from of old very wide- 
 spread. That arises possibly from the fact that 
 people there in Satsuma prize courage and man- 
 liness so very highly, while in other provinces where 
 comrade-love is little or not all known, women 
 command much more attention and love. For 
 one hears it said by well-informed folk that the 
 population in those provinces where the love of 
 youths prevail is more manly and robust, while 
 in regions which are void of it the people are 
 softer, more lax, and often more dissolute." Sat- 
 suma is celebrated, of course, even down to to-day 
 for the great athletes and warriors it produces and 
 has produced; and it has been pointed out what 
 a remarkable list may be made of well-known 
 heroes of the Russo-Japanese war coming from 
 this general region — among them, for instance, 
 Field-Marshals Saigo, Kawamura, and Oyama, 
 148 
 
THE SAMURAI OF JAPAN 
 
 and Admirals Togo and Yamamoto. Mr. Suweyo 
 Iwaya says (Ibid., pp. 467, 468) that the knight- 
 lings (corresponding to the Dorian eromenoi) 
 were called Kosho, and Dr. Karsch-Haack,* draw- 
 ing his information partly from Iwaya and partly 
 from other sources, says that "the Samurai, includ- 
 ing the military and nobility, in the feudal period 
 from the 12th century onwards, were reckoned the 
 first and most honorable class in Japan, and the 
 custom rooted itself among them more and more, 
 especially among the Daimyo chiefs, of having 
 attached to them, besides their wives, fine young 
 men or youths — their Kosho. And this passionate 
 love-relation of a knight to the youth whom he had 
 sought and won — a relation which now and again 
 under special circumstances would end in the 
 simultaneous death of both partners — found its 
 Japanese Homer in the unknown poet-author of 
 the romance Shidzu-no Odamaki." 
 
 A Japanese friend of mine assures me that of all 
 the historical characters of the "Age of Wars" 
 (400 years ago) Nobunaga Oda, a great overlord 
 and warrior-chief, was one of the most famous. 
 He is said to have had many Kosho; but of them 
 all Rammaru Mori was the most intelligent and 
 beautiful, and his special favourite. Tradition 
 
 *Forschungen ueber gleichgeschlechtliche Liebe (Munich, 1906), 
 P- 79- 
 
 149 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 affirms that the love-relation between Nobunaga 
 and Rammaru was most intimate. When Nobun- 
 aga's vassals revolted against him, Rammaru 
 fought very bravely for his lord, and seriously 
 damaged the enemy; but in a surprise attack 
 Nobunaga's party was defeated, and he and 
 Rammaru perished fighting side by side. 
 
 Dr. Karsch-Haack goes on to say that the region 
 of Satsuma has been from of old, and is yet to-day 
 the centre of this comrade-love; and as an explana- 
 tion of this fact he mentions the opinion just 
 quoted, which prevails there, concerning the 
 greater tendency of the affection to produce man- 
 liness and efficiency in the population; but he 
 says that "beyond this there used to be in Satsuma 
 under the old feudal regime — and until it was 
 abolished in 1868 — a law which considerably 
 limited normal intercourse between man and 
 woman, imposing the death penalty on any young 
 man under thirty who had dealings of sexual 
 nature with a woman.* This law arose out of 
 the circumstance that the population of Satsuma 
 was of a very warlike breed, and as generally ten 
 to twenty thousand men would be absent from 
 home on military campaigns, they would nat- 
 urally be in continual anxiety about the fidelity of 
 
 •The explanation is reported by Dr. Karsch-Haack as having 
 been verbally given to him by a commercial man residing in Japan. 
 150 
 
THE SAMURAI OF JAPAN 
 
 their wives, left exposed to the importunities of 
 the younger generation, unless the latter were kept 
 in check by severest penalties." 
 
 We have already mentioned the romance Shidzu- 
 no Odamaki, and as an illustration of Samurai 
 comradeship a brief digest of it may be given 
 (from the same author). The scene is laid 
 towards the end of the 16th century, and describes 
 the devotion existing between the young man 
 Yoshida Daizo, of the Daimyo's Court, and the 
 youth Hirata Sangoro, son of the chief attendant 
 of the court. Yoshida's love for Hirata begins 
 with his rescue of the latter from the hands of 
 two scoundrels; and on the outbreak of Japan's 
 second war with Korea (1597), Yoshida takes 
 Hirata as his companion-at-arms with him. Their 
 ages are now twenty-five and fifteen respectively. 
 Yoshida falls in battle, and when Hirata learns 
 of this, he throws himself on the enemy and dies 
 a hero's death. The story ends with the remark: 
 "Hirata's death was the simple result of his heart- 
 felt devotion to Yoshida, and his self-forgetting 
 friendship compelled him to this tragic end. But 
 such blossoms of knightly courage in the feudal 
 times are familiar to all, and we know how much 
 this sort of love-intimacy was prized, and what 
 tears this manner of dying elicited." 
 
 Of the same period apparently is the romance 
 
 151 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 M okukudzu-M onogatari. A young Samurai, Uneme, 
 of eighteen years of age, and in the service or 
 retinue of the lord Funakawa, falls desperately in 
 love with Ukyo, a youth of sixteen, also a Samurai, 
 and in the retinue of another lord, Sakuragawa. 
 Ukyo is wonderfully beautiful, well-formed, and 
 well-mannered, but Uneme finds no opportunity 
 to approach him or to confess his passion. A 
 chance meeting only makes matters worse. "Tor- 
 tured by unsatisfied longing he falls into a sheer 
 love-sickness. To impart his secret to anyone he 
 does not dare. Even his doctor fails to fathom the 
 cause of his suffering. But when one day the 
 patient receives a visit from some acquaintances, 
 who by chance bring Ukyo with them, he at once 
 is himself again, and his face fairly shines with 
 joy. Though his beloved does not understand, 
 Uneme directs towards him all the fulness of his 
 heart. Only one of his friends, the Shiga Samo- 
 nosuke, notices the change which Ukyo's presence 
 brings, and he guesses the secret. Uneme, at 
 first, when Samonosuke challenges him, denies 
 the truth out of shame. But presently Samono- 
 suke finds verses in which Uneme has given expres- 
 sion to his agony of love for Ukyo; and this dis- 
 covery brings about an open conversation. Uneme 
 confesses to Samonosuke his love, and at the same 
 time his dread of exposure and punishment, and 
 152 
 
THE SAMURAI OF JAPAN 
 
 his fear that under this unhappy dispensation he 
 will die. Samonosuke tries to soothe these 
 anxieties, and offers himself as mediator between 
 lover and beloved. And so it comes about that 
 Ukyo receives a letter from Uneme with a love- 
 poem therein. In his answer Ukyo expresses his 
 hope of seeing Uneme again right soon in full 
 health and activity; and Ukyo's friendliness works 
 like a charm on Uneme, who at once feels that 
 he has recovered. In their respective occupations 
 opportunities of meeting do not so often pre- 
 sent themselves to the youthful pair. Only at a 
 festival, on the occasion of a visit of the Shogun, 
 do they come to definite speech and mutual under- 
 standing. The youths swear to each other — what- 
 ever else may happen — to hold together in life 
 and in death. 
 
 "And from thenceforward they are one heart 
 and one soul. Till evil fate in the shape of Hosono 
 Chuzen, a contemporary and old comrade of 
 Uneme, steps between. This fellow, a young man 
 of bad and insolent nature and of repellent aspect, 
 had already for some time been scheming for the 
 possession of Ukyo, but the latter had taken no 
 notice of him. Now, however, he thinks the time 
 has come for him to represent his desire through 
 the mediation and introduction of a third per- 
 son, but is curtly and indignantly repulsed by 
 
 153 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 Ukyo. Hosono, out of revenge, determines on 
 Ukyo's death. When Ukyo hears a report of this, 
 he decides at first to turn to Uneme for help, but 
 rejecting this plan as too womanish, resolves to 
 forestall his mortal enemy, and does so by stabbing 
 him to death. Ukyo's superior officer hears of the 
 murder, and brings him to justice; but when Ukyo 
 makes known the circumstances which led to his 
 deed, he is only punished by a lenient confinement. 
 Hosono's father, however, with the help of the 
 Shujin Nato, in whose service he is, brings a 
 charge before Sakuragawa against the murderer 
 of his son; and Sakuragawa is obliged to repeal 
 the former sentence, and condemn the guilty man 
 to harakiri. 
 
 "Uneme, meanwhile, knowing nothing of all 
 this, is on a visit to his mother in Kanagawa. 
 Being informed by a letter from Samonosuke of 
 what has happened, he takes most affectionate 
 leave of his mother, and for ever, in order to return 
 with all speed to Yedo. On his earliest arrival 
 he repairs immediately to the Keiyo-ji Temple, the 
 place where such executions were always accom- 
 plished, and on that very spot comes upon Ukyo 
 in the midst of the tragic preparations for his 
 own suicide. He throws himself on the ground 
 beside Ukyo; and the friends once again exchange 
 a few words of tenderest import, embrace each 
 154 
 
THE SAMURAI OF JAPAN 
 
 other with tears, and then with dignity and heroism 
 complete the work of harakiri. 'They died like 
 dewdrops on the flowers of spring.' When Ukyo's 
 unhappy mother received the sign of the self- 
 destruction of her son — a tuft of his hair — she 
 lost her reason and drowned herself." 
 
 Dr. Haack, who gives the above two summaries, 
 says that according to J. Schedel, these two 
 romances "were till a few years ago classic 
 reading-lessons in the Japanese schools!" 
 
 But Nanshok Okagami (the Great Mirror of 
 Man's Love) seems to be the most classical col- 
 lection of such tales. It appeared first in 1687; 
 and its author, Saikaku, has for two centuries had 
 great renown in Japan, as a creative artist and 
 poetic realist; and though in his later period the 
 re-issue of his works has been prohibited, it may 
 be said of him that — "Pornography was by no 
 means the purpose of his literary activity, but 
 rather an untampered reproduction of real life, to 
 which, of course, a poetical side may always be 
 found. His works are wanting neither in charming 
 freshness, nor in deep feeling, nor in poetic 
 beauty." * Saikaku describes, in one place, the 
 loves of the young Okura and the eighteen-year- 
 old Geki — both sons of Shinto priests. "For two 
 years this comrade-alliance lasted, and during this 
 
 *Karsch-Haack, op. cit., p. 115. 
 
 155 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 time they were together night and day. One of 
 them was never seen alone. It was only with the 
 death of Okura that the tie was broken. Geki, 
 however, was then adopted by Okura's father, and 
 the latter's daughter was given to him for wife." 
 As models of such lovers, Saikaku draws the pic- 
 ture of Mondo and Hanimon, the one aged sixty- 
 three, and the other sixty-six. They learned to 
 know and love each other when the first counted 
 only sixteen years, while the second was nineteen 
 years old and had already gone through his course 
 of military instruction. For almost fifty years they 
 lived thus, as bachelors, in an ever renewed fresh- 
 ness of intimacy." 
 
 Dr. Von Meyer, in a book by his friend Elisar 
 von Kupffer, gives a translation of a few pages 
 from the story of Tamura by Saikak — which may 
 be reproduced here as an example of a rather more 
 sentimental and less heroic tale of Samurai love. 
 Kanimon Maruo, whose dress betrays that he is 
 a Samurai, falls in love, while on an angling excur- 
 sion, with a good-looking youth named Sannojo 
 Tamura, connected with the family of the Daimyo 
 of Koriyama. One evening, late, the latter has to 
 return, and by a somewhat dangerous route, from 
 a theatrical performance which he has attended. 
 "As Tamura reached the vicinity of Daianji (a 
 well-known temple) there came from a side-path 
 156 
 
THE SAMURAI OF JAPAN 
 
 a man in the style of a servant, with a cowl over 
 his head and a lantern in his hand, who walked 
 on in front of him. And by the help of this guide, 
 whom he gladly followed, Tamura soon reached 
 Koriyama. The man indeed went as far as 
 Tamura's house in Takata-Machi, and then turned 
 back again when he saw Tamura enter his home. 
 So far Tamura had not paid much attention, but 
 now the affair seemed really strange. He looked, 
 however, to his parents first, and let them know 
 of his return from the theatre. Having done this, 
 he went out again and hastened after the lantern, 
 and at length overtook it. By the glimmer of the 
 lantern he caught sight of a robe of chrysanthe- 
 mum pattern. And now guessing that this must 
 be the Samurai whom he had met once before, 
 by day, he followed the light closer; but in the 
 vicinity of Nara it slowly dwindled and went out, 
 and in the pitch darkness the keenest eyesight 
 could perceive nothing. Presently a voice became 
 audible: — 'Art thou not perhaps an attendant of 
 the young nobleman, sent to make enquiries, seeing 
 he was accompanied by a person in disguise?' 
 But Tamura knew the voice and said: — 'I have 
 followed thee back again so far, because I have 
 learned to know thy heart,' and he grasped 
 Maruo's hand. To Maruo it seemed all like a 
 dream, and for a time he stood quite still and 
 unable to speak. 
 
 157 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 'Is it all true?' he said. 
 
 'I am grateful to thee for thy friendliness,' 
 replied Tamura. 
 
 'Do not let thy feeling change!' 
 
 'My feeling shall not change.' 
 
 'Forget me not!' 
 
 'I will never forget thee.' 
 
 And so as they exchanged many such words, 
 the clock of Kiyo in the West struck two; and 
 as it was deep night they remained there and enter- 
 tained each other in the darkness; and before 
 dawn they made ready to return — though in truth 
 their parting came too soon. Each wished for a 
 favorable opportunity of meeting again. Maruo 
 accompanied Tamura back again, and on the way 
 they spoke of how uncertain life is. 'No one can 
 count on the cherry-tree blooming a second time, 
 that is why the ripe cherry is so beautiful!' And 
 so they made an appointment for the second day 
 of March." 
 
 And now Maruo catches a chill and dies. 
 Tamura, unsuspecting, arrives on the appointed 
 day, only to hear of the disaster. He goes to 
 Maruo's house, and finds the corpse already on 
 its bier, and praying beside it a young man whose 
 name proves to be Sanai. Amid tears and lamenta- 
 tions the two young men make acquaintance. 
 Tamura insists that he will put an end to his life, 
 158 
 
THE SAMURAI OF JAPAN 
 
 in order not to be separated from Maruo. Sanai, 
 not without much difficulty, dissuades him; and 
 finally out of their common love for Maruo the 
 two become close friends. They unite their lives, 
 and one night the spirit of Maruo appears to the 
 two sleepers and blesses their union. 
 
 Dr. Haack rightly says,* with regard to this 
 and the other works of Saikaku: — "How is it 
 possible to justify the complete neglect of this 
 literature? Saikaku's work does not only belong 
 to the history of literature generally, but is also a 
 mine of information for the history of Japanese 
 culture, such as can only be left out of considera- 
 tion by wilful suppression of the truth." 
 
 It is hardly possible to study the above and other 
 accounts of the Samurai Institution in Japan with- 
 out being struck by its resemblance . ( already 
 noticed) to the Dorian military comradeship. 
 Though the comrade-alliances of knight and 
 knightling were quite commonly recognised in 
 Japan, they never became exactly an institution of 
 the State as they were in Sparta and Crete; but 
 they obviously had their profound influence and 
 result in sealing and confirming the lofty standard 
 of honour represented by Bushido. 
 
 Dr. Friedrich Kraus, in his book on Japan, t 
 
 *Op. cit, p. 117. 
 
 \Das Geschlechtsleben der Japaner (Leipzig, 1911). 
 
 159 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 describes the comrade-relation there between knight 
 and youth as of the same noble type as among the 
 early Greeks; and he goes on to say that similar 
 relations continue to-day in the army, as between 
 officers and soldiers, and that many a time on the 
 battlefields of Manchuria during the last war they 
 inspired contempt of death or willing devotion of 
 life for the sake of a loved friend. 
 
 I may say that a friend of my own who took 
 part in the same war confirms this view, and 
 Karsch-Haack says t : — "If it is true, as eye-wit- 
 nesses of the campaign have declared, that com- 
 rade-love is still — as a legacy from the Samurai — 
 much favored in both the Japanese army and navy, 
 and that it has contributed not a little to the 
 marvelous results of their late war with Russia — 
 why then one can hardly reject as unjustifiable 
 the opinion that this love is more likely to encour- 
 age manly bearing than to stand in the way of 
 the same." 
 
 iop. cit., p. 121. 
 1 60 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 It may seem rather too late — at the close of a 
 book — to criticise its title! But in the present case 
 perhaps this is the best place for the purpose. It 
 may have occurred to readers of the foregoing 
 pages that the word "Intermediate" hardly covers 
 all the human types dealt with or spoken of. 
 Between the quite normal man and the quite nor- 
 mal woman there are certainly a number of inter- 
 mediate grades. There are men who approach 
 women more or less in their sex-temperament and 
 other respects — who are feminine or even effeminate 
 in their various degrees; and there are women who 
 approach men — who are somewhat masculine or 
 even virile; and specimens of all these degrees 
 have passed before us. But there are other types 
 which can hardly be called "intermediate." If 
 there are men who vary from the normal man- 
 type in the feminine direction — and who may per- 
 haps be termed "subvirile" — there are also men who 
 vary in the opposite direction, and may be called 
 
 161 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 "supervirile." If there are women who are less 
 feminine than the normal woman, there are also 
 other women who are "ultra-feminine." These 
 types — these superviriles and ultra-feminines — are 
 not between but beyond the normal boundaries. 
 And not only should we theoretically conclude on 
 the existence of such types, but practically we 
 discover them, both around us to-day, and among 
 the various peoples of the past. 
 
 There are certainly some men of amazing virility 
 — great fighters, organisers, thinkers — powerful both 
 in muscle and brain — who seem in their love-rela- 
 tions to stand to the ordinary man much as the 
 latter does to the woman. Prof. Gustav Jaeger * 
 said, in 1884: — "What struck me most at first, 
 but now appears to be perfectly explicable and 
 natural, is that among the homosexuals are to be 
 found the most remarkable specimens of men, 
 namely those that I call supervirile. Such men 
 stand by virtue of a special variation of their 
 soul-stuff as much above the man as the normally 
 sexual man does above the woman. Such a man 
 is able by virtue of his soul-aroma to bewitch 
 men, just as they, in the passive way, bewitch him. 
 And as he lives almost always in the society of 
 men, and men cast themselves at his feet, it often 
 
 *In the third part of his Lehrbuch der allgcmcinen Zoologie. 
 l62 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 happens that such a supervirile mounts to the 
 highest grades of mental and spiritual develop- 
 ment, of social position, and of masculine ability." 
 Dr. Jaeger then gives a strong list of generals, 
 sovereigns, philosophers, artists, etc., as examples. 
 Allowing something for a kind of enthusiastic 
 exaggeration in this passage, and something also 
 for the use of the invidious word "above" when 
 "beyond" perhaps would have been more to the 
 point, we may say that Dr. Jaeger's remarks of 
 thirty years ago have, on the whole, been corrobo- 
 rated and accepted by modern thought; and refer- 
 ing to the present volume we may fairly suppose 
 that the Dorian Greeks or the Japanese Samurai 
 must have counted among them men of such a 
 "supervirile" quality as he describes. 
 
 Similarly among the women alluded to here and 
 there in the first chapter above, there would doubt- 
 less be some ultra-feminine — who would stand in 
 their love-relation to the ordinary woman much as 
 the latter does to the normal man. In both these 
 cases the term "intermediate" is not quite the 
 fitting one; and I can only ask the reader to 
 excuse its use in consideration of the difficulty 
 of finding a term which really covers all the 
 ground. I must also acknowledge a similar deficiency 
 in the use of the expression "Primitive Folk" in 
 the title. The expression is somewhat too narrow, 
 
 163 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 and requires a good deal of stretching in order 
 to include the early Greek and Japanese civilisa- 
 tions; but I failed to find a better one to hand. 
 
 There is another point which may be mentioned 
 here. As we have seen that the varieties of human 
 type, intermediate and other, are very numerous, 
 almost endless, so we shall do well to keep in mind 
 that the varieties of love and sex-relation between 
 individuals of these types are almost endless, and 
 cannot be dispatched in sweeping generalisations 
 — whether such relations be normal or homosexual. 
 
 The British mind, curiously enough, if the latter 
 are mentioned as occurring among men, immedi- 
 ately flies to one only conclusion — the same in fact 
 as that indicated by the translators of the Bible in 
 dealing with the word "Kedeshim" (supra, p. 29) 
 and the common repugnance to the idea of mascu- 
 line love in this country is no doubt largely due to 
 this view — -since no great repugnance seems to be 
 felt to the idea of feminine amours. Now it would 
 be absurd and insincere to say that this mode of 
 familiarity does not occur; but it is certain that 
 in love-relations between men in the Western world, 
 it is comparatively rare and only to be found in a 
 small percentage of cases; and there is plenty of 
 evidence to show that even in the primitive world 
 of which we have been speaking it was by no 
 means always implied. If one reads Xenophon, 
 164 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 for instance, speaking as a contemporary of the 
 Dorian customs in Sparta, one finds that he 
 expressly denies the implication. Nor in foreign 
 countries to-day does the British view hold. 
 
 In Germany and Italy a quite devoted or passion- 
 ate love between men is recognised without people 
 necessarily assuming this particular expression of 
 it. And the common view here affords a strange 
 glimpse into the working of the British mind, and 
 has even led some foreigners to form a quite 
 unfavourable, and probably false, conclusion as to 
 our actual habits. 
 
 However this may be, I think the facts put for- 
 ward in the preceding papers about the early social 
 life of the world will never be understood in their 
 right light, and their real import recognised, until 
 it is perceived that love in a very true and deep 
 human sense lay at the root of most of the institu- 
 tions described, and became through them the 
 source of vital developments to humanity. Sex, 
 of course, has its perfect rights to expression and 
 consideration — and no sensible person would wish 
 to deny these; but we feel that love is the real thing 
 on which human nobility rests. When we once 
 clearly see and understand that — as for example 
 through the Dorian or the Samurai institutions — 
 it will doubtless become easier to understand some 
 of the more remote and primitive institutions dealt 
 with in the first chapter, on divination, etc. 
 
 165 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 One common cause of misunderstanding in these 
 matters is that in most cases where the modern 
 mind has to deal with ancient customs, of peoples 
 far back and alien from ourselves, we may indeed 
 know the outer forms, but we are profoundly igno- 
 rant of the real feelings and emotions which under- 
 lay and inspired them; and we easily fall into a 
 way, on the one hand, of falsely interpreting the 
 forms, and on the other hand, of ignoring their 
 inner meaning altogether. 
 
 There has been a tendency for instance — and 
 that no doubt derived largely from the Jewish Bible 
 — to dismiss the more or less sexual worships of 
 Syria and Babylonia as mere unadulterated wicked- 
 ness and licentiousness; but is this not largely 
 because we have so little means of seeing from 
 within what they really meant to those who took 
 part in them? The rite of Venus Mylitta, as de- 
 scribed by Herodotus (Book i. 199), by which every 
 woman was "obliged, once in her life, to sit in the 
 temple of Venus and have intercourse with some 
 stranger," sounds at a first reading like a mere 
 glorification of prostitution, and has led to much 
 horrified holding up of hands; but when one turns 
 to the further account by the same author (Book i. 
 131, 132), one sees that the worship must have 
 had great and admirable elements in it. It was 
 associated with sacrifice to the sun and moon and 
 166 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 the great powers of Nature, and "he that sacri- 
 fices is not permitted to pray for blessings for 
 himself alone ; but is obliged to offer prayers for 
 the prosperity of all." Richard Burton, referring 
 to this custom in The Thousand Nights and a Night 
 ( 1886, vol. x., p. 231), says, "It was a mere con- 
 secration of a tribal rite. Everywhere girls before 
 marriage belong either to the father or 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. ... It Is noticed by 
 Justin (xviii., c. 5), and it probably explains the 
 Succoth Benoth, or damsels' booths, which the 
 Babylonians transplanted to the cities of Samaria." 
 Or one may refer in the same connection to the 
 well-known passage in Captain Cook's First Voyage 
 (Hawkesworth ii. 128), where he describes the 
 rites of Venus performed as a religious ceremony 
 in Otaheite between a young man and a girl, in 
 public "before several of our people and a great 
 number of the natives; but, as appeared, in perfect 
 conformity to the custom of the place. Among the 
 spectators were several women of superior rank, 
 who may properly be said to have assisted at the 
 ceremony, for they gave instruction to the girl how 
 to perform her part." Here evidently a ceremony 
 indecent in the eyes of white folk excited respect 
 and reverence in the natives themselves. 
 
 167 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 Or again, we have quoted the Father Lafitau 
 (ch. i., supra) on the extraordinary customs of the 
 American Indians and their connection with reli- 
 gion, which he compares with similar features in 
 the old worships of Cybele or Venus Urania; and 
 anyone might superficially suppose that he dis- 
 misses all these customs as examples of mere 
 license. Yet in another passage of his book (vol. i, 
 p. 607) he compares the friendships of the Indians 
 to the heroic friendships of Greece, and after men- 
 tioning some of these latter, he continues: — "The 
 Brazilians call friends of this kind Atour-assap, 
 i.e., the perfect ally ("le parfait allie). The 
 Sieur de Leri (Leri, Hist, du Bresil, ch. xx.) assures 
 us that the alliance which is formed between them 
 by this sort of union is so strong that all their 
 possessions become absolutely in common, as 
 if they really were but one person; and that 
 the one cannot after that marry into the family 
 of the other, within the prohibited degrees, any 
 more than if they were blood relations of the first 
 degree." 
 
 "Among the Indians of North America," Lafitau 
 further says: "These friendship-relations do not 
 exhibit any appearance of vice, although there is 
 — or may be — a good deal of this in fact. They are 
 very ancient in their origin, very marked and con- 
 stant in their form, sacred almost, if I may say 
 168 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 so, in respect of the union which they compose, and 
 of which the bonds are as closely knit as those 
 of blood and of nature. Nor can they be dissolved 
 unless indeed one of the two, rendering himself 
 unworthy by such cowardices as would dishonour 
 his friend, should force the latter to renounce 
 the alliance — a thing which some missionaries have 
 assured me they have witnessed examples of. The 
 relatives of the friends are the first to encourage 
 these alliances, and to respect their rights and 
 duties; and the selections are honorable in char- 
 acter, being founded on mutual merit according to 
 their idea, on conformity of customs, and on a 
 kind of rivalry which makes each one wish to be 
 the friend of those who are well thought of and 
 justly honoured. 
 
 "These friendships are gained by presents made 
 by the one to such other as he desires to have as 
 friend; they are maintained by mutual tokens of 
 good will; and the friends remain companions of 
 the chase, the war, and of fortune; and have the 
 right to food and hospitality each in the cabin 
 of the other. The warmest compliments indeed 
 that one can make to the other is to give him 
 this name of friend; and these friendships mature 
 with advancing age, and are so closely connected 
 that one often finds among them a heroism similar 
 to that of Orestes and Pylades." (Lafitau con- 
 
 169 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 eludes this passage by quoting stories, told him 
 by the missionaries, of such Indian friends refus- 
 ing to be separated and insisting on dying together.) 
 
 Such evidence as this does not point to a state 
 of unadulterated wickedness! And in fact may 
 we not say that it is extremely improbable that 
 any great people that has left an abiding mark 
 upon the world has had its institutions and religion 
 built upon mere sexual license ? Would it not 
 argue indeed a great want of perception in anyone 
 to suppose such a thing? We may, however, say 
 this, that probably for these earlier folk who lived 
 so much more out in the great open of Nature 
 than we do, and who also lived, mentally speak- 
 ing, in the great open of the tribal life of their 
 fellows, their outlook on the world was in many 
 respects far saner than ours. There was probably 
 less disease both of body and mind, and many 
 things were clean to them which for us have become 
 soiled and unclean. There was a religion of the 
 body, and a belief in the essential sacredness of 
 all its processes, which we somehow have lost — and 
 which we shall not probably socially regain until 
 we once more adopt the free life of the open air 
 and restore the healing and gracious sense of 
 • human community and solidarity. 
 
 Bearing this in mind it becomes possible to see 
 that a great many of the customs we have men- 
 170 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 tioned, whether in Syria or Babylonia, or in Greece, 
 or in Africa, or in North and South America, had 
 a value quite other than that which appears at 
 first sight — a profound and human value — and that 
 they represented necessary contributions towards 
 the evolution of mankind and the expression of 
 its latent powers. And as regards the present 
 volume, I think we may say that the general result 
 of the enquiries contained in it is to show that 
 among primitive folk variations of sex-tempera- 
 ment from the normal have not been negligible 
 freaks, but have played an important part in the- 
 evolution and expansion of human society — that in 
 a certain sense variations of social activity have 
 run parallel with and been provoked by varia- 
 tions in sex-temperament. 
 
 We have seen that among early peoples the quite 
 normal man is warrior and hunter, and the quite 
 normal woman house-wife and worker-round-the- 
 house; and it is quite conceivable that if no inter- 
 mediate types had arisen, human society might 
 have remained stationary in these simple occupa- 
 tions. But when types of men began to appear 
 who had no taste for war and slaughter — men, 
 perhaps, of a more gentle or feminine disposition; 
 or when types of women arose who chafed at the 
 slavery of the house, and longed for the open 
 field of adventure and activity — women, in fact, of 
 
 171 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 a more masculine tendency — then necessarily and 
 quite naturally these new-comers had to find, and 
 found, for themselves new occupations and new 
 activities. The intermediate types of human beings 
 created intermediate spheres of social life and 
 work. And we have seen that there is abundant 
 evidence to show (what, of course, all physiology 
 and modern thought would lead us to expect) that 
 these variations of the general human type com- 
 monly sprang from, or at least were most inti- 
 mately associated with, variations of the sex-tem- 
 perament itself; or perhaps we should say of the 
 germ-plasm which lies at the back of the sex- 
 temperament. We have seen over and over again 
 in the preceding pages that peculiar classes of 
 men and women, diverging from the normal in 
 their sex-customs and habits, became the reposi- 
 tories and foci of new kinds of learning and skill, 
 of new activities and accomplishments. Thus the 
 foundational occupations of human life — such as 
 fighting, hunting, child-rearing, and agriculture — 
 having been laid down by the normal sex types, it 
 was largely the intermediate types who developed 
 the superstructure. The priest or medicine-man 
 or shaman was at first the sole representative of 
 this new class, and we have seen that he was almost 
 invariably, in some degree or other, of Uranian 
 temperament. 
 172 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 His work, to begin with, was prophetic or divi- 
 natory; but this soon branched out on the one 
 hand into rude poetry, drama, dance and song — 
 what we should call Art — and on the other into 
 elementary observation of the stars and the sea- 
 sons, medicine and the herbs — what we should call 
 Science. The temples became centres of learning 
 and of the development of the arts and crafts. 
 And a god who combined in some degree the 
 attributes of both male and female was commonly 
 worshipped in their courts. 
 
 So far with regard to the sex-types that may 
 be called truly intermediate. But we have touched 
 on the existence also of types quite beyond the 
 normal at either end of the scale — namely the super- 
 virile man and the ultra-feminine woman. We have 
 seen that the facts now accessible suggest that 
 the supervirile type of man has done great serv- 
 ice to the world in furnishing it not only with 
 superb individuals — generals, organisers, and 
 leaders of men; but also with powerful and noble 
 races and classes like the Dorians or the Samurai. 
 There is a certain a priori probability in this theory, 
 but it waits for further study and development. 
 Finally we have the ultra-feminine woman whose 
 special mission to society may perhaps turn out 
 to reside in works of charity and mercy; but this 
 type has at present been but little studied or 
 
 173 
 
INTERMEDIATE TYPES 
 
 considered, and before pronouncing any opinion it 
 would be wise to wait and see what the actual facts 
 may indicate. 
 
 174 
 
INDEX 
 
 Achilles, 79, 96, 121 
 
 Achnutschiks or wizards, 37 
 
 Adam, as bisexual, 73. 
 
 Adonis, 77 
 
 Aelian cited, 122, 135 
 
 Aeschylus, his tragedy Myrmidones, 100 
 
 Afghanistan, n 
 
 Albania, modern customs in, 99, 126, 127 
 
 Aleuts, the, 16 
 
 Amazons, 24, 81 
 
 Ancient customs often misunderstood, 166 
 
 Androgyni, 24, 73, 75-77 
 
 Andromache, 106. 
 
 Angakoks or Esquimaux priests, 18-20, 56, 64 
 
 Aphroditus or male Aphrodite, 76, 77, 78, 81 
 
 Apollo, worship of, 27, 123, 125, 126; connected with Syrian rites, 
 
 28 ; as feminine, 79, 81, 83 ; hymn to, 128 
 Arabia, n, 115 
 Areoi of Polynesia, 61 
 Aristotle cited, 97, 108 
 Art, a branch of early religion, 173 
 Artemis, 81, 123 
 
 Asherah, or sacred "grove," 29, 30 
 Ashtoreth or Astarte, worship of, 28, 29, 75 
 Assiniboin Indians, 44 
 Atour-assap, "the perfect ally," 168 
 
 175 
 
INDEX 
 
 Baal, 29, 31, 50, 74; as feminine, 75 
 
 Bab, the Persian, 82 
 
 Babylonia, 28 
 
 Bacchus, 78 
 
 Bancroft quoted, 18 
 
 Bastian, Adolf, quoted, 15, 46, 47 
 
 Bearded Isis, the, 76, 81 
 
 Benecke's Women in Greek poetry quoted, 106 
 
 Berdashe or Bardache, 23; story of, 38; sudden adoption of new life, 
 
 43; as medicine-man, 56; called Bote, 68, 69 
 Bethe, Professor, quoted, 97, 98, 114, 118-21, 125, 128 
 Bisexuality, 47, 71; of the gods, 72, 73, 83 
 Blackfoot Indians, 44 
 Bloch, Iwan, quoted, 15, 46 
 Borneo, customs in, 41 
 Brahm, as two-sexed, 71, 72, 74, 82 
 Brotherhood unions, 126; solemnised by Christian Church, 127; in 
 
 Japan, 147 
 Buddha, 83 
 Bulgaria, 51 
 
 Burton, Richard, quoted, 28, 34, 76, 167 
 Bus/iido, code of Japanese honour, 137, 139 et seg., 159 
 Byron, 82 
 
 Catlin's North American Indians quoted, 21, 23 
 
 Chaeronaea, battle of, 101 
 
 Charlevoix quoted, 67 
 
 China, 33 
 
 Choupans, 18, 20, 56 
 
 Chukchi, the, 16 
 
 Cieza de Leon quoted, 33, 35 
 
 Commerce forbidden, 141 
 
 Competitions, of love, 129; of dancing, 141; of wit, 141 
 
 Congo region customs, 41 
 
 Cook, Captain, in Otaheite, 167 
 
 Corinth, temple at, 76, 166 
 
 I76 
 
INDEX 
 
 Cotterill, H. B., quoted, 128 
 
 Cratinus and Aristodemus, 99 
 
 Cretan customs, 93-95, 98, 119, 159 
 
 Cross-dressing, 17, 24, 25, 26, 28; 34, 39-42, 45, 47, 69, 78, 79, 114 
 
 Crow Indians, 44, 68 
 
 Cyprus customs, 76 
 
 Daimyo, the, of Japan, 138, 139 
 
 Dakota Indians, 44 
 
 Dances, 22, 23, 123-5 
 
 Dancers as a class, 60, 61 
 
 De Pauw cited, 67, 68 
 
 Dcvadasis of the Hindu temples, 29, 131 
 
 Dickinson, Lowes, quoted, 105, 107, m, 142 
 
 Dionysus, discourse on, by Aristides, 78 ; bisexual, 83 
 
 Divination, 20, 23, 24, 35, 45, 62 
 
 Dorian Greeks, their god Apollo, 27 ; their social institutions, ch. V. 
 et seq.; their early history, 89 ; admiration of courage rather 
 than beauty, 94, 117, 124; honour paid to women, 107; strong 
 
 sense of public life, 118, 135, 136; festivals in Thera, 123 sg. 
 
 # 
 
 East Indian customs, 131 
 
 Effeminacy, 12, 16, 24, 25, 41 
 
 Elephanta, sculptures at, 72 
 
 Elisar von Kupffer quoted, 156 
 
 Ellis, William, missionary, quoted, 26, 61 
 
 Elohim, both male and female, 73 
 
 Enarees, or Androgyni, 24 
 
 Erastes, the, responsible for the eromenos, 119 
 
 Esquimaux, the, 18, 19 
 
 Falkner, Thomas, on Patagonia, 36, 37 
 
 Feminine types of men, 16, 18, 22 sg., 34, 36 sq., 59, 60, 66 sq., 171 ; 
 
 traits in men of genius, 82 
 Firmicus, Julius, quoted, 25, 75 
 
 Florida Indians, 24; as supposed Hermaphrodites, 66, as nurses, 67 
 
 177 
 
INDEX 
 
 Fox Indians, 23 
 
 Frazer, Dr. J. G, quoted, 29, 30, 32, 39, 42, 76, 78 
 Freia, the Scandinavian goddess, as androgyne, 77 
 Friendships, high ideal of some, 165, 168; religious and public sane 
 tion, 169, 170 
 
 Gorgo, wife of Leonidas, anecdote of, no 
 
 Hahn's Albanesische Studien, 99, 126 
 
 Hammond, W. A., quoted, 25 
 
 Harakiri, or "happy dispatch," 141, 154 
 
 Harmodius and Aristogeiton, 99 
 
 Hearn, Lafcadio, quoted, 138 
 
 Hercules, as woman, 78; and Iolaus, 121, 129 
 
 Hermaphrodites (supposed), 45, ch. IV.; examined by Dr. Holder, 
 68 ; reported by Lafitau, 70 ; violent charges against, and cruel 
 persecution of, 70, 71 ; among the gods, 71-83 ; referred to by 
 Plato, 74 
 
 Herodotus quoted, 24, 75, 166 
 
 Hierodouloi or Temple-slaves, 76 
 
 Hiller von Gaertringen, discoveries in Thera, 123-5 
 
 Hirschfeld, Dr. M., cited, 41 
 
 Holder, Dr. A. B., investigations in Montana, 68 
 
 Homer, position of women in, 105, 106 
 
 Homosexuality; and divination, 20, 23, 35, 45, 48, 56; and magic, 
 12, 17, 22, ch. II., 47, 48, 50; and heresy, 51; and religious 
 orders, 56; wide prevalence of, at some early time, 47, 54, 57; 
 its place in social evolution, 57, 171 ; among the Greeks, 104 
 
 Illinois Indians, 22, 24 
 
 Inman, Thomas, cited, 30, 72 
 
 Inoits, the, 16, 17 
 
 Intermediate types: two main branches, n; as prophets or priests, 
 ch. I.; as supernatural, 22, 24, 42, 45, 46, 61; as initiators of the 
 finer arts and crafts, ch. III., 57 sq., 172; their place in social 
 evolution, 58, 171; the first thinkers, 59; their intuitive double 
 
 178 
 
INDEX 
 
 nature, 62-64; as nurses, 67; and adopting feminine occupations, 
 
 69; as warriors, ch. V. et seg. 
 Irving, John T., quoted, 43 
 Isis, bearded, 76, 81 
 
 Jaeger, Gustav, quoted, 162 
 
 Japanese customs, 33, 115, ch. VIII.; feudal constitution of old 
 
 Japan, 138, 143 ; virility of Japanese combined with sense of 
 
 beauty, 142 
 Jehovah bisexual, 74 
 Jesus of Nazareth, 82 
 Jewish Temple, rites in, 28, 30, 31 
 
 Kadiak Islanders, 16, 17, 37 
 
 Kamchadales, the, 16, 17 
 
 Karsch-Haack quoted, 26, 33, 37, 42, 68, 149, 150, 160 
 
 Keating, W. H., quoted, 45 
 
 Kedeshim, the, of Syria, 20, 28, 3a, 164 
 
 Koekcuc, the, 17 
 
 Konyagas, the, 18, 37 
 
 Koriaks, the, 17 
 
 Kosho, of Japan, 149 
 
 Kosio, the, of West Africa, 20, 38 
 
 Krasheninnikoff quoted, 17 
 
 Kraus, Friedrich, on Japan, 160 
 
 Lafitau, the missionary, quoted, 24, 70, 168 
 
 Lao-tsze quoted, 63 
 
 Leguevel de Lacombe quoted, 60 
 
 Le Moyne, the traveller, quoted, 66 
 
 Leo Africanus quoted, 38 
 
 Leri, Hist, of Brasil, quoted, 168 
 
 Lesbian institutions, 113 
 
 Louisiana Indians, 24 
 
 Love-inscriptions on rocks, &c, 124, 125 
 
 179 
 
INDEX 
 
 Madagascar, customs, 41, 60 
 
 Magic, 12, 17, ch. II., 47, 49, 50, 52 
 
 Mandan Indians, 21, 44 
 
 Manitous, 22 
 
 Marriage, by capture, 93, 98, 114, 115; ceremonial in Corinth and 
 Boeotia, and Modern Albania, 99 
 
 Maruo and Tamura, story of, 156-9 
 
 Masculine women, 18, 24 
 
 Matriarchal institutions, 51, 52; as explaining cross-dressing, 53; as 
 favouring the U rani an attachment, 113 
 
 Medicine-men, 15, 58 
 
 Metamorphosis, sudden, of sex-temperament, 25, 40, 42, 43 ; connec- 
 tion with the moon, 44, 45, 47, 76 
 
 Mexican Indians, 25 
 
 Midrasch, the, quoted, 73 
 
 Military comradeship, 11., ch. V.; in Sparta, 91, 92, 119; in Crete, 
 93, 98 ; its antiquity, 98, 106 ; wide prevalence and social impor- 
 tance, 99, 104, no; approved by Solon, 100; neglect of, in mod- 
 ern times, 102, 103; high ideal, 119, 120, 122, 130; sanctioned by 
 religion, 122 et seq.; in Japan, 146-60; 172 
 
 Miller, Joaquin, Life among the Modocs, quoted, 23 
 
 Mitford, Tales of Old Japan, 143, 147 
 
 Mithras, as two-sexed, 75, 81, 82 
 
 Modoc Indians, 23 
 
 Mohammedans, n 
 
 Mokukudzu-Monogatari, Japanese romance, 152 
 
 Moll, Dr. A., quoted, 41 
 
 Moon, the, ruling sex-transformations, 44, 45, 47, 76 
 
 Morocco, customs, 38 
 
 Mother-goddess, the, 30, 31, 79 
 
 Mujerados, 25, 26 
 
 Miiller, C. O., on the Dorians, 27, 88, 91 tg., 95, 97, 107, 114 
 
 Music, its practice and influence, 141 
 
 Nanshok-Okagami, stories of Old Japan, 147, 155, 157 
 
 Neith, the Egyptian goddess, as bisexual, 77 
 
 l8o 
 
INDEX 
 
 Nitobe, Inazo, quoted, 140, 143 
 
 Nobunaga, warrior-chief of Japan, story of, 149 
 
 Okura and Geki, story of, 155 
 
 Omphale, queen of Lydia, 79 
 
 Ordeals, 18, 61 
 
 Orphic Hymns, the, 77, 82 
 
 Osiris, 83 
 
 Othaheite, 167 
 
 Otoe brave, story of, 43 
 
 Pacific Islanders, 26 
 
 Paganism and Christianity, opposition, 49, 50 
 
 Paiderastia, meaning of the term, 89, 96, 97; its social value, 97, 98, 
 
 119; favoured by women, 113 
 Parastates or "stand-by" (term for military companion or squire), 
 
 9°. 95, 97, 122 
 Patagonian customs, 36, 41 
 Pawnee Indians, sex-metamorphosis, 43 
 Pearson, Karl, ' quoted, 51, 52 
 Pelew Islanders, 39, 43 
 Persians, 115 
 Phoenicians, the, 76, 123 
 Philolaus and Diodes, 96, 99 
 Plato's views, 97, 100 
 
 Plutarch cited, 28, 100, 108, no, 113, 114, 129, 135 
 Polybius quoted, 142 
 Priest as "grandmother," 41 
 Priesthood, nature of early, 58 
 Prophetic gifts, 20, 23, 24, 30, 35, 62 
 
 Rabbis quoted on bisexuality, 73 
 Reclus quoted, 17, 18 
 Religion and sex in antiquity, 131-4 
 Robertson, J. M., cited, 75 
 
 l8l 
 
INDEX 
 
 Romer, Dr. von, cited, 73, 77 
 
 Russo-Japanese War, heroes of, 148; comradeship in, 160 
 
 Sac Indians, 23 
 
 Saikaku, Japanese author, 155, 159 
 
 Samurai, the, of Japan, 88, ch. VIII., 173 ; commerce forbidden to, 
 
 141; stories of, 144, 146; root in chivalrous attachments, 145; 
 
 ideals compared with Dorians and mediaeval Europe, 145, 146, 159 
 Sappho, 113 
 Satsuma, province of Japan, customs, 141 ; honour paid to courage, 
 
 148; quaint law in, 150 
 Science, early, 60, 61 ; a branch of religion, 173 
 Semiramis, 79 
 Shamans, 16, 17, 172 
 
 Shidzu-no Odamaki, a Japanese romance, 149, 151 
 S ho gun, the, of Japan, 138 
 Sidne, the Esquimaux Demeter, 19 
 Simplicity of life, among the Dorians, 118, 119; among the Samurai, 
 
 141 
 Sioux Indians, 23, 24 
 Siva, the god, bisexual, 8i, 82 
 Sodomites, 29 
 Solon cited, 100 
 
 Sophocles, his tragedy Niobe, too 
 Souls, the transfusion of, 133, 134, 136 
 Spartan customs, 91, 100, 119; freedom of woman, 107; athletic 
 
 maidens, 109; feminine associations, 114; bridal custom, 114; 
 
 commerce forbidden, 141 
 Strabo quoted, 93, 98, 117, 123 
 
 Succoth-Benoth, or damsels' booths, in Samaria, 167 
 Supervirile men, 161-3, J 73 
 Suyewo-Iwaya, of Japan, quoted, 147 
 Symonds, J. Addington, quoted, 89, 96, 100, 107, no; on chivalric and 
 
 platonic loves, 120 
 Syrian rites, 28, 31, 79, 131, 166 
 182 
 
INDEX 
 
 Temple rites and customs: Jewish, 28, 30, 31; Buddhist, 33, 56; Peru- 
 vian, 33, 56; at Cyprus and Corinth, 76, 166; at Thera in the 
 /Egean, 123; in Syria, 131, 166; temples the early centres of art 
 and science, 173 
 
 Theban Band, the, 101, 129 
 
 Theban customs, 119, 129 
 
 Theocritus quoted, 109, 129 
 
 Theognis cited, 119 
 
 Thera, Island of, 123, 128; rock-inscriptions in, 124; festival and 
 meeting-ground of Dorian tribes, 128 
 
 Tsecats of Madagascar, 60 
 
 Ultra-feminine women, 162, 173 
 
 Uneme and Ukyo, story of, 152-5 
 
 Upanishads quoted, 73, 132, 133 
 
 Uranian temperament, the: connection with divination, ch. I.; favour- 
 able to the arts and crafts, ch. III., 87, 172; to military comrade- 
 ship, 88 sq.\ not leading to neglect of women, 105, no, in; 
 favoured in the matriarchal period, 113; a spontaneous out- 
 growth, 115 
 
 Varieties, both of human type and human love-relation, 164; con- 
 nected with varieties of social activity, 171, 172 
 
 Venus with beard, 76; Mylitta, 76, 166; rite of Venus as religious 
 ceremony, 167 
 
 Visions, 19, 64, 65 
 
 Warlike or man-like women, 24, 39, 58, 68, 76, 77, 79, 109 
 
 Warrior-pairs, 99, 121, 129, 144, 149 sq., 160 
 
 Westermarck quoted, 16, 17, 22, 31, 36, 50 
 
 Whatham, A. E., cited, 30 
 
 Wied, Maximilian, quoted, 38, 43, 44 
 
 Wilson, Captain James, quoted, 26 
 
 Witches, 37-39; former priestesses, 5a 
 
 Wizards, 17, 31, 32, 36 sg., 58 
 
 183 
 
INDEX 
 
 Women, position of, among Dorians, ch. VI.; one of freedom and 
 honour, 107 et seg.; public and open life in Sparta, 108, 109; 
 fall in status in later Greece, m, 112 
 
 Xavier, Francis, quoted, 33 
 Xenophon cited, 164 
 
 Yogi of India and his guru, 64 
 Yoritomo, one of the first Samurai, 140 
 Yoshida and Hirata, story of, 151 
 Yucatan, 24 
 
 Zeus in the Orphic Hymns, 77, 82; temple at Thera, 123 
 
 184