Studies in the Psychology of Sex Volume Vi Part 16

[123]

Guyot, La Prost.i.tution, p. 8. The element of venality is essential, and religious writers (like Robert Wardlaw, D. D., of Edinburgh, in his Lectures on Female Prost.i.tution, 1842, p. 14) who define prost.i.tution as "the illicit intercourse of the s.e.xes," and synonymous with theological "fornication," fall into an absurd confusion.

[124]

"Such marriages are sometimes stigmatized as 'legalized prost.i.tution,'" remarks Sidgwick (Methods of Ethics, Bk. iii, Ch. XI), "but the phrase is felt to be extravagant and paradoxical."

[125]

Bonger, Criminalite et Conditions Economiques, p. 378. Bonger believes that the act of prost.i.tution is "intrinsically equal to that of a man or woman who contracts a marriage for economical reasons."

[126]

E. Richard, La Prost.i.tution a Paris, 1890, p. 44. It may be questioned whether publicity or notoriety should form an essential part of the definition; it seems, however, to be involved, or the prost.i.tute cannot obtain clients. Reuss states that she must, in addition, be absolutely without means of subsistence; that is certainly not essential. Nor is it necessary, as the Digest insisted, that the act should be performed "without pleasure;" that may be as it will, without affecting the prost.i.tutional nature of the act.

[127]

Hawkesworth, Account of the Voyages, etc., 1775, vol. ii, p. 254.

[128]

R. W. Codrington, The Melanesians, p. 235.

[129]

F. S. Krauss, Romanische Forschungen, 1903, p. 290.

[130]

H. Schurtz, Alterskla.s.sen und Mannerbunde, 1902, p. 190. In this work Schurtz brings together (pp. 189-201) some examples of the germs of prost.i.tution among primitive peoples. Many facts and references are given by Westermarck (History of Human Marriage, pp. 66 et seq., and Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, vol. ii, pp. 441 et seq.).

[131]

Bachofen (more especially in his Mutterrecht and Sage von Tanaquil) argued that even religious prost.i.tution sprang from the resistance of primitive instincts to the individualization of love. Cf. Robertson Smith, Religion of Semites, second edition, p. 59.

[132]

Whatever the reason may be, there can be no doubt that there is a widespread tendency for religion and prost.i.tution to be a.s.sociated; it is possibly to some extent a special case of that general connection between the religious and s.e.xual impulses which has been discussed elsewhere (Appendix C to vol. i of these Studies). Thus A. B. Ellis, in his book on The Ewe-speaking Peoples of West Africa (pp. 124, 141) states that here women dedicated to a G.o.d become promiscuous prost.i.tutes. W. G. Sumner (Folkways, Ch. XVI) brings together many facts concerning the wide distribution of religious prost.i.tution.

[133]

Herodotus, Bk. I, Ch. CXCIX; Baruch, Ch. VI, p. 43. Modern scholars confirm the statements of Herodotus from the study of Babylonian literature, though inclined to deny that religious prost.i.tution occupied so large a place as he gives it. A tablet of the Gilgamash epic, according to Morris Jastrow, refers to prost.i.tutes as attendants of the G.o.ddess Ishtar in the city Uruk (or Erech), which was thus a centre, and perhaps the chief centre, of the rites described by Herodotus (Morris Jastrow, The Religion of Babylonia and a.s.syria, 1898, p. 475). Ishtar was the G.o.ddess of fertility, the great mother G.o.ddess, and the prost.i.tutes were priestesses, attached to her worship, who took part in ceremonies intended to symbolize fertility. These priestesses of Ishtar were known by the general name Kadishtu, "the holy ones" (op. cit., pp. 485, 660).

[134]

It is usual among modern writers to a.s.sociate Aphrodite Pandemos, rather than Ourania, with venal or promiscuous s.e.xuality, but this is a complete mistake, for the Aphrodite Pandemos was purely political and had no s.e.xual significance. The mistake was introduced, perhaps intentionally, by Plato. It has been suggested that that arch-juggler, who disliked democratic ideas, purposely sought to pervert and vulgarize the conception of Aphrodite Pandemos (Farnell, Cults of Greek States, vol. ii, p. 660).

[135]

Athenaeus, Bk. xiii, cap. x.x.xII. It appears that the only other h.e.l.lenic community where the temple cult involved unchast.i.ty was a city of the Locri Epizephyrii (Farnell, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 636).

[136]

I do not say an earlier "promiscuity," for the theory of a primitive s.e.xual promiscuity is now widely discredited, though there can be no reasonable doubt that the early prevalence of mother-right was more favorable to the s.e.xual freedom of women than the later patriarchal system. Thus in very early Egyptian days a woman could give her favors to any man she chose by sending him her garment, even if she were married. In time the growth of the rights of men led to this being regarded as criminal, but the priestesses of Amen retained the privilege to the last, as being under divine protection (Flinders Petrie, Egyptian Tales, pp. 10, 48).

[137]

It should be added that Farnell ("The Position of Women in Ancient Religion," Archiv fur Religionswissenschaft, 1904, p. 88) seeks to explain the religious prost.i.tution of Babylonia as a special religious modification of the custom of destroying virginity before marriage in order to safeguard the husband from the mystic dangers of defloration. E. S. Hartland, also ("Concerning the Rite at the Temple of Mylitta," Anthropological Essays Presented to E. B. Tyler, p. 189), suggests that this was a p.u.b.erty rite connected with ceremonial defloration. This theory is not, however, generally accepted by Semitic scholars.

[138]

The girls of this tribe, who are remarkably pretty, after spending two or three years in thus ama.s.sing a little dowry, return home to marry, and are said to make model wives and mothers. They are described by Bertherand in Parent-Duchatelet, La Prost.i.tution a Paris, vol. ii, p. 539.

[139]

In Abyssinia (according to Fiaschi, British Medical Journal, March 13, 1897), where prost.i.tution has always been held in high esteem, the prost.i.tutes, who are now subject to medical examination twice a week, still attach no disgrace to their profession, and easily find husbands afterwards. Potter (Sohrab and Rustem, pp. 168 et seq.) gives references as regards peoples, widely dispersed in the Old World and the New, among whom the young women have practiced prost.i.tution to obtain a dowry.

[140]

At Tralles, in Lydia, even in the second century A.D., as Sir W. M. Ramsay notes (Cities of Phrygia, vol. i, pp. 94, 115), sacred prost.i.tution was still an honorable practice for women of good birth who "felt themselves called upon to live the divine life under the influence of divine inspiration."

[141]

The gradual secularization of prost.i.tution from its earlier religious form has been traced by various writers (see, e.g., Dupouey, La Prost.i.tution dans l'Antiquite). The earliest complimentary reference to the Hetaira in literature is to be found, according to Benecke (Antimachus of Colophon, p. 36), in Bacchylides.

[142]

Cicero, Oratio pro Coelio, Cap. XX.

[143]

Pierre Dufour, Histoire de la Prost.i.tution, vol. ii, Chs. XIX-XX. The real author of this well-known history of prost.i.tution, which, though not scholarly in its methods, brings together a great ma.s.s of interesting information, is said to be Paul Lacroix.

[144]

Rabutaux, in his Histoire de la Prost.i.tution en Europe, describes many attempts to suppress prost.i.tution; cf. Dufour, op. cit., vol. iii.

[145]

Dufour, op. cit., vol. vi, Ch. XLI. It was in the reign of the h.o.m.os.e.xual Henry III that the tolerance of brothels was established.

[146]

In the eighteenth century, especially, houses of prost.i.tution in Paris attained to an astonishing degree of elaboration and prosperity. Owing to the constant watchful attention of the police a vast amount of detailed information concerning these establishments was acc.u.mulated, and during recent years much of it has been published. A summary of this literature will be found in Duhren's Neue Forshungen uber den Marquis de Sade und seine Zeit, 1904, pp. 97 et seq.

[147]

Rabutaux, op. cit., p. 54.

[148]

Calza has written the history of Venetian prost.i.tution; and some of the doc.u.ments he found have been reproduced by Mantegazza, Gli Amori degli Uomimi, cap. XIV. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, a comparatively late period, Coryat visited Venice, and in his Crudities gives a full and interesting account of its courtesans, who then numbered, he says, at least 20,000; the revenue they brought into the State maintained a dozen galleys.

[149]

J. Schrank, Die Prost.i.tution in Wien, Bd. I, pp. 152-206.

[150]

U. Robert, Les Signes d'Infamie au Moyen Age, Ch. IV.

[151]

Rudeck (Geschichte der offentlichen Sittlichkeit in Deutschland, pp. 26-36) gives many details concerning the important part played by prost.i.tutes and brothels in mediaeval German life.

[152]

They are described by Rabutaux, op. cit., pp. 90 et seq.

[153]

L'Annee Sociologique, seventh year, 1904, p. 440.

[154]

Bloch, Der Ursprung der Syphilis. As regards the German "Frauenhausen" see Max Bauer, Das Geschlechtsleben in der Deutschen Vergangenheit, pp. 133-214. In Paris, Dufour states (op. cit., vol. v, Ch. x.x.xIV), brothels under the ordinances of St. Louis had many rights which they lost at last in 1560, when they became merely tolerated houses, without statutes, special costumes, or confinement to special streets.

[155]

"Cortegiana, hoc est meretrix honesta," wrote Burchard, the Pope's Secretary, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, Diarium, ed. Thuasne, vol. ii, p. 442; other authorities are quoted by Thuasne in a note.