James Weir
Religion and Lust
Now, why is this? There can be but one answer, and that is that these people simply inherited a portion of the psychos of their forefathers, which made the tenets of this religion natural and easy of belief. I have demonstrated, I believe, that religious feeling was not a psychical trait in the beginning; like a number of other mental attributes, it was the result of evolution.137 Mental abstraction, especially as associated with religious feeling, was the result of psychical growth, of psychically inherited experiences.138 As psychos grew beneath the fostering influence of ages of experience, the mind became able to formulate abstract thought. In the beginning, the process of ratiocination was, necessarily, very simple; but, simple as it was, it was able to recognize the source of life—first, in the sun, then, in the second place, in man himself; and, finally and abstractly, in a source outside of, but connected with, man. This abstract source, which sprung from sexuality, ab initio, they deified and worshiped. Thus we see that, in the very beginning, the worship of the generative principle sprung from, and was a part of, man himself. Throughout thousands and thousands of years, religious feeling and sexual desire, the component parts of phallic adoration, were intimately associated; finally, religio-sexuality became an instinct, just as a belief in the existence of a double or soul became an instinct.
Belief in the existence of a soul has never been repressed; its utility is still recognized; hence, it is present in our active consciousness. The accumulated experiences of civilization have, however, declared the inutility of phallic worship, hence, it has been crowded out of our active consciousness by a process of selection and has been relegated to the innermost recesses of our subliminal consciousness, where also dwell many other formerly active instincts of our savage ancestors. When circumstances favoring their appearances occur, these pseudo-dormant instincts always become evident; it is due to this fact that the correlation of religious emotion and sexual desire exists.
VIRAGINITY AND EFFEMINATION
In following up the chain of evolution in animal life from its inception in primordial protoplasm to its end, as we now find it, we discover that the interlinking organisms are, in the beginning, either asexual or hermaphroditic. The moneron, the lowest form of animal life, simply multiplies by division. The different elements through which propagation and generation are carried on, are undoubtedly present even in the moneron, but are not differentiated. The moneron is an organless, structureless organism, consequently asexual. The cell, on the contrary, is hermaphroditic, for it contains within itself the necessary elements for reproducing itself. The amœba is the connecting link which connects all terrene life with primitive bathybian protoplasm, and is, strictly speaking, a true hermaphrodite. Ascending at once to the sixth stage in the ancestry of man, we come to the acoelomi, or worms without body cavity. These worms are phylogenetic, consequently hermaphroditic. I do not mean to say that these worms have the organs of each sex equally developed; therefore, in the use of the word hermaphrodite, I use it in its broadest sense. I simply mean that they are autogenetic. In the rhabdocoela the sexual organs appear in their simplest forms—a testis anterior to a single or double ovary. Other gliding worms have a more complex arrangement of the sexual organs, but most of them are true hermaphrodites. Next in the chain of evolutionary development, and one step nearer man, we find the soft worms (scolecidae); from a branch of this family the parent group of vertebrates was developed. The immediate ancestor of the vertebrates was either the amphioxus (lancelet) or some other notochordate animal, whose type is now extinct. Thus we have traced hermaphroditism from the amœba to the amphioxus, from the ancestor of the parent cell to the ancestor of the vertebrates. We could carry it further, but it is unnecessary. Effemination and viraginity, are due directly to the influence of that strange law laid down by Darwin—the law of reversion to ancestral types. It is an effort of nature to return man to the old hermaphroditic form from which he was evolved. It is an effort on the part of nature to incorporate the individualities of the male and female, both physical and psychical, in one body. The phenomenon of atavism is more apt to occur in feeble types than in strong, healthy and well-developed types. Microcephalism, occurring, as it most frequently does, among ignorant, ill-nourished, and unhealthy people, is an example. Dolichocephalism and a flattening of the cranial arch, with corresponding loss of capacity in the skull—types that we see everywhere among the depraved and vicious—are other examples of this tendency of atavism to seize on weakened and unhealthy subjects. Effemination finds more victims among the wealthy and the educated than among the poor and uneducated. This phenomenon is a psychic rather than a physical hermaphroditism, and is directly traceable to the enervation produced by the habits of the wealthy and unemployed. Wealth begets luxury, luxury begets debauchery and consequent enervation. Periods of moral decadence in the life of a nation are always coincident with periods of luxury and great wealth, with consequent enervation and effemination; examples of this may be found in the histories of Rome, Greece, and France. During the reign of Louis XV., examples of effemination crowded into the court and vied with the royal fop in the splendor of their raiment and effeminacy of their bearing. Psychic hermaphroditism does not occur naturally in uncivilized or half-civilized races. The reason for this is patent. Atavism finds among them no weakened and enervated subjects on whom to perpetrate this strange travesty on nature.
Large cities are the hotbeds and breeding-places of the various neuroses. There general paresis treads closely upon the heels of sexual neurasthenia, while the victims of hysteria and kindred ills are almost countless in their number. What wonder, then, that the offspring of such parents should be weak and neurasthenic, and fall easy victims to the thousand and one erotic fancies which beset them! What wonder that here atavism finds its richest field, and plays its strangest and most fearful pranks, sending men into the world with the tastes, desires, and habits of women, and women with all the mental hibitudes of men! Juvenal wrote in scathing, searing sarcasm of the degeneracy of the Roman youth; effemination was very prevalent, and this bitter satirist wrote burning words against their degrading and bestial practices. It seems to me that we are beginning to need a Juvenal for this day and generation!
People divide themselves into classes, and these classes are generally exceedingly clannish. It is not considered “good form” to marry out of the class to which an individual may belong, consequently, no new types of individuals are added. Luxury and debauchery enervate the classes which indulge in them. The people of these classes intermarry among themselves, no new blood is added, hence, in a very few generations, degeneration sets in.
Effemination and viraginity are common types of degeneration which always follow in the wake of luxury and debauchery. Effemination makes its appearance early in life. The young boy likes the society of girls; he plays with dolls, and, if permitted, will don female attire and dress his hair like a girl. He learns to sew, to knit, to embroider, to do “tatting.” He becomes a connoisseur in female dress, and likes to discuss matters pertaining to the toilet of females. He does not care for boyish sports, and when he grows older, takes no pleasure in the amusements and pursuits of his masculine acquaintances. He prefers to spend his time with women and to engage in their employments and amusements. As the change in his psychic being becomes more pronounced and more overpowering, he will endeavor to approach the female in gait, attitude, and style of dress.
I have seen mothers guilty of incalculable harm by fostering such inclinations in their sons. They think (the thought is a natural one) that such perversions of taste indicate gentleness and kindliness, and induce their sons to continue in the practice of them, thus assisting atavism in its baneful work.
Effemination is a disease which, taken at its inception, can generally be eradicated and cured. As soon as it is discovered, the boy’s surroundings should be changed; his mind should be directed into new channels, and his dormant boy’s nature aroused. Outdoor exercise and a free intercourse with companions of his own sex should be made important factors in the treatment of an incipient effeminant. He should be carefully watched until vita sexualis has been established; he should then be taught the dangers of youthful follies and indiscretions.
A dandified man is always ridiculous, but when he adds to his foppery, effemination, he then becomes contemptible.
Several years ago I had the opportunity of studying a pronounced effeminant. He is one of the best known young men of a Southern city, and is a leader in society. He took me to his “boudoir” and showed me his “lingerie.” The words quoted are his own. His nightgowns were marvels of artistic needlework, as far as I was able to judge, and were made by himself. His nightcaps were “sweetly pretty,” and one of them was a “perfect dream of beauty.” On his dressing-table were all the accessories of a modern society woman’s toilet, including rouge, powder, a complete manicure set, and numerous bottles of perfumes and toilet waters. In his wardrobe he had displayed on forms, some six or eight corsets and chemisettes—“corset-covers,” as he designated them.
This man’s voice and manner of speaking are decidedly feminine; all the little mannerisms and affectations of a society woman being faithfully reproduced. I understand from his associates that he is a splendid business man, and that not a breath of scandal has ever tarnished his good name. He was reared by his mother, and never associated with boys until his sixteenth year. I understood from him that she always treated him as a girl, and consulted him in all things pertaining to her toilet. He seemed utterly unconscious of his anomalous condition, and as his business associates are gentlemen, and his intimate friends are ladies, he may drift through life without a single jar to mar the serenity of his existence.
Viraginity is, comparatively, an infrequent occurrence, but under its influence the unfortunate victims are guilty of startling vagaries. The recent case of Alice Mitchell, who killed Miss Ward, at Memphis, Tenn., is an example of pronounced viraginity. We see daily in the newspapers accounts of women who masquerade as men, and history abounds in like instances. The celebrated writer Count Sandor V. was a woman who posed as a man, and who was in fact Sarolta (Charlotte), Countess V. “Among many foolish things that her father encouraged in her was the fact that he brought her up as a boy, called her Sandor, allowed her to ride, drive, and hunt, admiring her muscular energy.” At the age of thirteen she ran away from school, where she had been sent by her mother, and returned home. “Sarolta returned to her mother, who, however, could do nothing and was compelled to allow her daughter to again become Sandor, wear male clothes, and, at least once a year, to fall in love with persons of her own sex.”
Mothers, early in life, though not from any sense of danger to their daughters, begin to eradicate the tom-boy inclinations in their female children; hence the comparative infrequency of viraginity. The congenital viragint will always remain somewhat masculine in her tastes and ideas, but her inclinations and desires having been turned toward femininity early in life, she will escape the horrors of complete viraginity or gynandry. The victim of effemination, however, is saved by no such accidental forethought. The ignorant mother fosters feminine inclinations and desires in her effeminate son until his psychic being becomes entirely changed, and not even the establishment of vita sexualis will save him from effemination.
An only son, who is in the least degree neurasthenic, runs the risk of becoming an effeminant under the tutelage of a loving but ignorant mother who encourages his feminine tastes and inclinations. A young man of my acquaintance, who is an only son, is so situated. This young man devotes his entire attention to matters of the toilet. He paints his cheeks and powders his face; even his eyebrows and eyelashes are anointed with some dark-colored ointment or pomade.
Effemination and viraginity are more prevalent in the Old World than in the United States. The civilization and settlement of the United States are, comparatively speaking, new. The people are, as yet, a young, strong, and vigorous nation. Years of luxury and debauchery have not yet brought the penalty of enervation and neurasthenia to the masses, though in certain circles of society, it is becoming painfully evident that that penalty is being even now exacted.
In this article I have described only mild types of viraginity and effemination. In the more pronounced types of these singular examples of atavism or reversion, the victims commit the most unheard of and the most unnatural acts.
Almost every case of effemination or viraginity can be cured if recognized and treated in its incipiency. The parents should be the physicians. They should keep a watchful supervision over their offspring, and as soon as any evidences of effemination or viraginity become apparent, treatment, both physical and psychical, should at once be instituted.
Effemination has occasioned the downfall of many nations; let us guard against it with all our power. Let us train up our boys to be manly men, and our girls to be womanly women.
BORDERLANDS AND CRANKDOM
When that bilious critic and merciless crucifier of human foibles, Carlyle, himself a degenerate, wrote that nine-tenths of the world were fools, he was much nearer truth than most men think. When we take an introspective view of our sane personality, we shudder to see how near it is to the borderlands of insanity and the bizarre and eccentric world of crankdom. There hardly lives a man who does not possess some eccentricity, or who does not cherish, hidden, perhaps, deep within himself, some small delusion, which he is ashamed to acknowledge to the outside world. Social relations and the iron rules of custom hold in place the balance-wheel of many a disordered mind. The mental equipoise is kept at the normal standard only by the powerful aid of the will, supported and assisted by extraneous adjuvants, such as fear of punishment, fear of personal harm, and, above all, by the fear of ridicule. Many a man hugs his delusions closely to his heart, indulges them only in the secret recesses of his soul, and, their sole owner and acquaintance, carries them with him to his grave.
Any man who has a retentive memory, and one capable of minute analysis, can look back in his life and recall moments when his insane personality got the better of his will, and ran riot in forbidden pathways. He may not have committed an insane act; yet the thought, the impulse, the delusion was there and only outside influences kept it from breaking forth. Who fails to remember certain times in his life when he has had an almost overpowering desire to cry out in church, or to laugh on some sad or solemn occasion; or, having a razor in his hand, has had an impulse, sudden and intense, to draw it across his throat; or, being on some high place, has been seized with the desire to hurl himself downward? This shows how near indeed the healthy mind ever hovers on the borderlands of insanity.
Man stands so close to the portals of insanity that he can look through the gateway, when he takes an introspective view of his psychical being, and can see the phantoms and mental ghosts of his insane personality.
We have every reason to believe that, among civilized races, there is a vast amount of latent insanity. Taking the tables of our insane asylums, we find a thousand and one causes given as the exciting factors in the mental overthrow. Love, religion, anger, disappointment, etc., down through the long list of psychic and æsthetic emotions, until it seems as though even a breath of wind would be sufficient to destroy the mental equipoise.
Among savage and uncivilized races, insanity is of infrequent occurrence. Only when a race begins to elevate itself and take on a higher view of morality, when new rules and new laws, new customs and innovations, tending to place individuals in a state of comparison, arise, does insanity make its appearance. The untutored savage, living in a state of communism, is untroubled by the jealousies and heart-burnings of his civilized congener. He lives in the to-day and allows the to-morrow to take care of itself. Devoid of ambition, a mere animal, sensual and indolent, he cares only for the gratification of his physical desires. The mental attributes of a civilized being are, in him, wanting.
Psychos is the result of evolutionary development, and the chief reason why insanity is not as prevalent in the savage as in the civilized man, is because the brain of the savage lacks development. I do not wish to convey the idea that insanity is purely psychical in its nature. Insanity is the result of a material change in the structure of the brain produced by morbific action. The manifestations of insanity are merely the symptoms of a disease that involves the brain. The savage has less development of psychical function, consequently he is less liable to mental lesion. I mean by psychical function that portion of the brain in which psychos has its origin. Alienists consider the habits of men as being the factor in the production of insanity. Habits and heredity are undoubted factors in the production of diseased minds, and, in fact, are the chief agents. You cannot, however, expect to find a disordered function where that function is absent. Savages have paresis, apoplexy, and imbecility, seldom or never insanity. The reason is patent—they lack the psychic function, that peculiar element, whatever it may be, which raises civilized man so high above them. That this element can be developed in savages I do not for one instant deny. The ploughshare of evolutionary civilization will bring it to the surface sooner or later, and when it does insanity follows. I have only to point to the American negro to prove the truth of my proposition; even he is partially exempt, simply because his civilization is of such recent date that his brain has not yet acquired its full quota of the psychic element.
I will venture to assert, so true is the fact that insanity is the product of civilization, that, if it were not for the combating influences of social laws, assisted not a little by scientific medical aid, all North America could not contain the vast and enormous army that would constitute the civilized world’s array of lunatics.
There seems to be in the minds of men an instinctive awe of anything that appertains to the insane. In olden times a disordered mind was considered of divine or diabolic origin as it evinced good or evil tendencies. This belief lasted even until the present century. Many old women who were the victims of senile dementia and kindred ills, were accused of witchcraft and intercourse with the devil, here in the United States, not a century ago. Witches were executed in England and men burned at the stake in Spain, not two hundred years ago, for the crime of demoniacal possession. Even in this enlightened age men are accustomed to consider insanity rather from its psychical standpoint than from its physical aspect. They do not take into consideration the fact that insanity is due to a physical lesion, and that its vagaries are but the symptoms of brain disease or brain deformity. The inhabitants of the borderlands are invested with a certain shadowy mystery which separates them from the rest of mankind, and which makes them appear to us as denizens of another psychical world than ours.
In the Middle Ages, cranks, whose eccentricities took a religious turn, were considered holy. St. Simon Stylites was a very pronounced crank, and a very holy man also, because he chose to live the greater portion of his life perched on a pillar seventy feet high. St. Anthony was another holy crank who never, in all his life, washed his feet. Poor Joan of Arc was burned at the stake because she was “possessed of a false and lying devil.” She has been recently proposed for canonization by the same church that burned her, and thus, in a measure, had justice done her. I do not think, however, that this is any recompense for the terrible agony inflicted on this unfortunate victim of hystero-epilepsy.
Says Maudsley in “Responsibility in Mental Disease”: “Some of the prophets of the Old Testament presented symptoms which can hardly be interpreted as other than the effects of madness; certainly if they were not mad, they imitated very closely some of its most striking features.” Jeremiah takes a long journey to the river Euphrates and hides a linen girdle in a hole of a rock. He then returns home and in a few days makes the same journey, and finds the girdle rotten and good for nothing. Ezekiel digs a hole in the wall of his house, and through it removes his household goods, instead of through the door. Hosea marries a prostitute because he said he had been commanded by God so to do. Isaiah stripped himself naked and paraded up and down in sight of all the people.
Some of the greatest changes in the world’s history have been effected by dwellers in the borderlands. Mahomet was an epileptic, and his first vision was the result on an epileptic convulsion or seizure. The character of his visions was exactly like that of those visions which an epileptic sees and describes at the present time. Mahomet believed in his visions, and, what is more, got more than half the world to believe in them also. Gautama was a dweller in the borderlands, yet his followers now number five hundred millions.
The novel mode in which an insane man regards things may be an inspiration which reflection could never attain, and it sometimes happens that opinions which seem to the world to be the ravings of a madman, have turned out to be true. The insane man has the world against him, and though he may pose for a short time as a reformer, sooner or later lands in the asylum.
It sometimes happens that the crank will succeed in getting converts. A notable instance is Schweinfurth, or “the Christ,” as he calls himself. I am firmly convinced that this man believes in his delusions. One thing is certain, and that is, his disciples believe in him implicitly. This man is dangerous to society, inasmuch as he has caused the separation of several wives from their husbands; the wives abandoning their husbands to follow him to “Heaven,” as he calls his farm house.
The crank is, generally, a harmless individual, and is not anti-social unless his delusions take the form of homicidal impulse, pyromania, kleptomania, etc.
Homicidal impulse is the most dangerous to society of the many mental vagaries and derangements which afflict the dwellers in the borderlands. Its invasion is sudden and its impulse is, generally, overpowering. A man may be walking the streets presumably in perfect health, and yet have, all the while, a voice whispering in his ear “kill, kill.” His insane desire at length reaches its acme, and he throws aside every mental restraint and kills the first individual he may chance to meet. Again, he may desire to kill some particular individual, and will carefully and systematically arrange his plans for the successful enactment of the homicide. The murderers of Garfield and Harrison probably belong to this latter class, though in the case of Prendergast, the slayer of Mayor Harrison, this opinion may be erroneous. There is something about his photograph that leads me to believe that he is a moral imbecile, rather than an intellectual dyscrasiac.
A clerk in a solicitor’s office, at Alton, Hampshire, England, one afternoon took a walk outside the town, when he met some children. He persuaded one of these, a girl of nine, to go with him into a neighboring garden. A short while after, he was seen walking quietly home; he was seen to wash himself in the river and then go back to his office. The little girl did not return home, and, search having been instituted, her dismembered body was found strewn about the garden. The clerk was arrested, and in his diary was found this entry, recently made: “Killed a little girl; it was fine and hot.” This man was either a sadistic sexual pervert, or a victim of homicidal impulse. Maudsley gives this instance as an example of the latter, while Krafft-Ebing gives it as an example of the former. There is a great difference between these two mental derangements. The victim of homicidal impulse kills without any ulterior object, while the sadist kills in order to gratify his unnatural and perverted sexual appetite.
The victim of homicidal impulse is, to all outward appearances, perfectly sane otherwise. His impulse frequently leaves him for years and then returns with overpowering force.
Epileptics who have just passed through violent convulsions, will frequently attack bystanders with great fury. Some alienists declare that homicidal mania is frequently only a masked epilepsy. All epileptics should be carefully watched; they may become dangerous to society at any moment. Numerous instances are recorded of murder committed by sufferers from petit mal, a form of epilepsy. I once saw a negro walk up to a white man, who was a stranger and unknown by him, and fell him to the earth by striking him with a club. The negro was arrested, and the next day swore that he was entirely unconscious of having struck anyone. It was proven at his trial that he was subject to mild epileptic attacks.
I believe that all suicides are due to mental aberration. It may be the result of a momentary and sudden loss of mental equipoise, or the final and fatal ending of a premeditated desire carried through days, weeks, months, and even years.
We see a man, blessed with everything that makes life enjoyable, genial, gay, with a ready smile and kindly word for everyone, suddenly, in a moment, pass forever out into the unknown—self-killed, a victim of his own creation. We stand amazed! Why did he do it? We can find nothing in his past or present condition to warrant such an action.
He was the victim of momentary aberration, or, perhaps, deep in his mind, buried and hidden even from himself, there dwelt a desire for self-slaughter, when a “physical pain, an unexpected impression, a moral affection, an indiscreet proposition” uncovered this desire, and he at once committed the deed!
There are epidemics of suicide. Let the papers chronicle some peculiar method of suicide selected by some unfortunate, and others will immediately follow his example. Unconscious cerebration also hurls many souls out of the world. I was called to see a gentleman who had attempted suicide by slashing the radial artery at the wrist. I found him holding a compress on the severed vessel and greatly alarmed. He swore to me that he was totally unconscious how he had come to do the deed, and that he did not know that he had cut himself until he felt the pain and saw the blood flowing from the wound!
Viraginity and effemination, while not mental insanities, strictly speaking, are, nevertheless, mental deformities, and their unfortunate victims are dwellers in the borderlands. Mild forms of these types of degeneration are very abundant. The effeminate, cigarette-smoking, soda-drinking young man of the comic weeklies, and the loud, horsy, slang-using, vulgar, masculine young woman are seen everywhere.
Effemination and viraginity are the results of the weakening effects of luxury and consequent debauchery. Nations, time and again, have felt the dire effects of effemination and have sunk beneath them. The Grecian, the Roman, the Egyptian nations are familiar examples. The satirists of the golden age of the Latin people dipped their stili, metaphorically, in gall and bitter wormwood and berated the effeminate nobility time and again. One of them advised the Roman ladies to look for men among the gladiators and the peasants! Anacreon’s poems are filled with allusions to effemination and the delights of psychic hermaphroditism.
In the time of Louis XIV., of France, the royal palaces were filled to repletion with effeminants, who vied with the women in the splendor of their robes and the salacious eccentricities of their conduct. The case of Alice Mitchell, who killed Freda Ward in Memphis not long ago, was one of pronounced viraginity.
Fortunately, for the good of the community at large, there are, comparatively speaking, few viragints. The careful mother restrains, tempers, and abolishes the hoydenish habits of her “tom-boy” girl early in life, and turns her thoughts toward feminine pursuits and desires. The unfortunate effeminant, however, is encouraged in his feminine tastes and habits by his unwise mother, who likes her boy to sit beside her and sew and knit, if he so desires. She discusses matters of the toilet with him, and, in fact, treats him as she would a daughter. In the end, his psychic hermaphroditism becomes complete, and one more unfortunate goes out into the world to swell the ranks of crankdom!
Kleptomaniacs are greatly to be pitied, for they are generally women in whom the moral sense is very much developed. The victim of kleptomania will steal any and everything; they are like magpies in this respect. An acquaintance of mine, a most estimable lady, a devout Christian, and a most exemplary wife and mother, is the most incorrigible thief I ever saw. She has often picked my pockets while I was engaged about her sick-bed. The merchants of the city where she lives know her infirmity, watch her while she is in their shops, and respectfully and kindly relieve her of her pilferings when she starts to leave. She expresses great sorrow for her unfortunate insane impulse, and has often begged her husband to have her placed in an asylum. This he refuses to do, as she is perfectly sane otherwise. The husband was called away for several weeks, and, on his return, took me to his house and showed me her room. In the room were the objects stolen during his absence. It was the most miscellaneous collection of valuables and trash I ever saw. She had gathered together everything from a darning-needle to a tombstone, a small specimen of the latter forming a unit of this heterogeneous whole. This form of mental dyscrasia is much more frequent than people suppose, and the antecedents of shop-lifters and the like should be carefully examined before a judgment on their criminality is passed.