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Jules Bois (_Visions de l'Inde_, p. 86) describes the spectacle
presented in the temple of the cows at Benares: "I put my head
into the opening of the holy stables. It was the largest of
temples, a splendor of precious stones and marble, where the
venerated heifers passed backwards and forwards. A whole people
adored them. They take no notice, plunged in their divine and
obscure unconsciousness. And they fulfil with serenity their
animal functions; they chew the offerings, drink water from
copper vessels, and when they are filled they relieve themselves.
Then a stercoraceous and religious insanity overcomes these
starry-faced women and venerable men; they fall on their knees,
prostrate themselves, eat the droppings, greedily drink the
liquid, which for them is miraculous and sacred."
(Cf. Bourke,
_Scatalogic Rites_, Chapter XVII.)
Among the Chevsurs of the Caucasus, perhaps an Iranian people, a
woman after her confinement, for which she lives apart, purifies
herself by washing in the urine of a cow and then returns home.
This mode of purification is recommended in the Avesta, and is
said to be used by the few remaining followers of this creed.
We have not only to take into account the frequency with which among
primitive peoples the excretions possess a religious significance. It is
further to be noted that in the folk-lore of modern Europe we everywhere
find plentiful evidence of the earlier prevalence of legends and practices
of a scatalogical character. It is significant that in the majority of
cases it is easy to see a sexual reference in these stories and customs.
The legends have lost their earlier and often mythical significance, and
frequently take on a suggestion of obscenity, while the scatalogical
practices have become the magical devices of lovelorn maidens or forsaken
wives practiced in secrecy. It has happened to scatalogical rites to be
regarded as we may gather from the _Clouds_ of Aristophanes, that the
sacred leathern phallus borne by the women in the Bacchanalia was becoming
in his time, an object to arouse the amusement of little boys.
Among many primitive peoples throughout the world, and among the
lower social classes of civilized peoples, urine possesses magic
properties, more especially, it would seem, the urine of women
and that of people who stand, or wish to stand, in sexual
relationship to each other. In a legend of the Indians of the
northwest coast of America, recorded by Boas, a woman gives her
lover some of her urine and says: "You can wake the dead if you
drop some of my urine in their ears and nose."
(_Zeitschrift für
Ethnologie_, 1894, Heft IV, p. 293.) Among the same Indians there
is a legend of a woman with a beautiful white skin who found on
bathing every morning in the river that the fish were attracted
to her skin and could not be driven off even by magical
solutions. At last she said to herself: "I will make water on
them and then they will leave me alone." She did so, and
henceforth the fish left her. But shortly after fire came from
Heaven and killed her. (Ib., 1891, Heft V, p. 640.) Among both
Christians and Mohammedans a wife can attach an unfaithful
husband by privately putting some of her urine in his drink. (B.
Stern, _Medizin in der Türkei_, vol. ii, p. 11.) This practice is
world-wide; thus among the aborigines of Brazil, according to
Martius, the urine and other excretions and secretions are potent
for aphrodisiacal objects. (Bourke's _Scatalogic Rites of All
Nations_ contains many references to the folk-lore practices in
this matter; a study of popular beliefs in the magic power of
urine, published in Bombay by Professor Eugen Wilhelm in 1889, I
have not seen.)
The legends which narrate scatalogic exploits are numerous in the
literature of all countries. Among primitive peoples they often
have a purely theological character, for in the popular
mythologies of all countries (even, as we learn from Aristophanes, among the Greeks) natural phenomena such as the
rain, are apt to be regarded as divine excretions, but in course
of time the legends take on a more erotic or a more obscene
character. In the Irish _Book of Leinster_ (written down
somewhere about the twelfth century, but containing material of
very much older date) we are told how a number of princesses in
Emain Macha, the seat of the Ulster Kings, resolved to find out
which of them could by urinating on it melt a snow pillar which
the men had made, the woman who succeeded to be regarded as the
best among them. None of them succeeded, and they sent for
Derbforgaill, who was in love with Cuchullain, and she was able
to melt the pillar; whereupon the other women, jealous of the
superiority she had thus shown, tore out her eyes.
(Zimmer,
"Keltische Beiträge," _Zeitschrift für Deutsche Alterthum_, vol.
xxxii, Heft II, pp. 216-219.) Rhys considers that Derbforgaill
was really a goddess of dawn and dusk, "the drop glistening in
the sun's rays," as indicated by her name, which means a drop or
tear. (J. Rhys, _Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as
Illustrated by Celtic Heathendom_, p. 466.) It is interesting to
compare the legend of Derbforgaill with a somewhat more modern
Picardy folk-lore _conte_ which is clearly analogous but no
longer seems to show any mythologic element, "La Princesse qui
pisse par dessus les Meules." This princess had a habit of
urinating over hay-cocks; the king, her father, in order to break
her of the habit, offered her in marriage to anyone who could
make a hay-cock so high that she could not urinate over it. The
young men came, but the princess would merely laugh and at once
achieve the task. At last there came a young man who argued with
himself that she would not be able to perform this feat after she
had lost her virginity. He therefore seduced her first and she
then failed ignobly, merely wetting her stockings.
Accordingly,
she became his bride. (Kryptadia, vol. i. p. 333.) Such legends,
which have lost any mythologic elements they may originally have
possessed and have become merely _contes_, are not uncommon in
the folk-lore of many countries. But in their earlier more
religious forms and in their later more obscene forms, they alike
bear witness to the large place which scatalogic conceptions play
in the primitive mind.
It is a notable fact in evidence of the close and seemingly normal
association with the sexual impulse of the scatalogic processes, that an
interest in them, arising naturally and spontaneously, is one of the most
frequent channels by which the sexual impulse first manifests itself in
young boys and girls.
Stanley Hall, who has made special inquiries into the matter,
remarks that in childhood the products of excretion by bladder
and bowels are often objects of interest hardly less intense for
a time than eating and drinking. ("Early Sense of Self,"
_American Journal of Psychology_, April, 1898, p.
361.)
"Micturitional obscenities," the same writer observes again,
"which our returns show to be so common before adolescence,
culminate at 10 or 12, and seem to retreat into the background as
sex phenomena appear." They are, he remarks, of two classes:
"Fouling persons or things, secretly from adults, but openly with
each other," and less often "ceremonial acts connected with the
act or the product that almost suggest the scatalogical rites of
savages, unfit for description here, but of great interest and
importance." (G. Stanley Hall, _Adolescence_, vol.
i, p. 116.)
The nature of such scatalogical phenomena in childhood--which are
often clearly the instinctive manifestations of an erotic
symbolism--and their wide prevalence among both boys and girls,
are very well illustrated in a narrative which I include in
Appendix B, History II.
In boys as they approach the age of puberty, this attraction to the
scatalogic, when it exists, tends to die out, giving place to more normal
sexual conceptions, or at all events it takes a subordinate and less
serious place in the mind. In girls, on the other hand, it often tends to
persist. Edmond de Goncourt, a minute observer of the feminine mind,
refers in _Chérie_ to "those innocent and triumphant gaieties which
scatalogic stories have the privilege of arousing in women who have
remained still children, even the most distinguished women." The extent to
which innocent young women, who would frequently be uninterested or
repelled in presence of the sexually obscene are sometimes attracted by
the scatalogically obscene, becomes intelligible, however, if we realize
that a symbolism comes here into play. In women the more specifically
sexual knowledge and experience of life frequently develop much later than
in men or even remains in abeyance, and the specifically sexual phenomena
cannot therefore easily lend themselves to wit, or humor, or imagination.
But the scatalogic sphere, by the very fact that in women it is a
specially intimate and secret region which is yet always liable to be
unexpectedly protruded into consciousness, furnishes an inexhaustible
field for situations which have the same character as those furnished by
the sexually obscene. It thus happens that the sexually obscene which in
men tends to overshadow the scatalogically obscene, in women--partly from
inexperience and partly, it is probable, from their almost physiological
modesty--plays a part subordinate to the scatalogical.
In a somewhat
analogous way scatalogical wit and humor play a considerable part in the
work of various eminent authors who were clergymen or priests.
In addition to the anatomical and psychological associations which
contribute to furnish a basis on which erotic symbolisms may spring up,
there are also physiological connections between the genital and urinary
spheres which directly favor such symbolisms. In discussing the analysis
of the sexual impulse in a previous volume of these _Studies_, I have
pointed out the remarkable relationship--sometimes of transference,
sometimes of compensation--which exists between genital tension and
vesical tension, both in men and women. In the histories of normal sexual
development brought together at the end of that and subsequent volumes the
relationship may frequently be traced, as also in the case of C.P. in the
present study (p. 37). Vesical power is also commonly believed to be in
relation with sexual potency, and the inability to project the urinary
stream in a normal manner is one of the accepted signs of sexual
impotency.[26] Féré, again, has recorded the history of a man with
periodic crises of sexual desire, and subsequently sexual obsession
without desire, which were always accompanied by the impulse to urinate
and by increased urination.[27] In the case, recorded by Pitres and Régis,
of a young girl who, having once at the sight of a young man she liked in
a theater been overcome by sexual feeling accompanied by a strong desire
to urinate, was afterward tormented by a groundless fear of experiencing
an irresistible desire to urinate at inconvenient times,[28] we have an
example of what may be called a physiological scatalogic symbolism of sex,
an emotion which was primarily erotic becoming transferred to the bladder
and then remaining persistent. From such a physiological symbolism it is
but a step to the psychological symbolisms of scatalogic fetichism.
It is worthy of note, as an indication that such phenomena are
scarcely abnormal, that a urinary symbolism, and even a strictly
sexual fetichism, are normal among many animals.
The most familiar example of this kind is furnished by the dog,
who is sexually excited in this manner by traces of the bitch and
himself takes every opportunity of making his own path
recognizable. "This custom," Espinas remarks (_Des Sociétés
Animales_, p. 228), "has no other aim than to spread along the
road recognizable traces of their presence for the benefit of
individuals of the other sex, the odor of these traces doubtless
causing excitement."
It is noteworthy, also, that in animals as well as in man, sexual
excitement may manifest itself in the bladder. Thus Daumas states
(_Chevaux de Sahara_, p. 49) that if the mare urinates when she
hears the stallion neigh it is a sign that she is ready for
connection.
It is in masochism, or passive algolagnia, that we may most frequently
find scatalogic symbolism in its fully developed form.
The man whose
predominant impulse is to subjugate himself to his mistress and to receive
at her hands the utmost humiliation, frequently finds the climax of his
gratification in being urinated on by her, whether in actual fact or only
in imagination.
In many such cases, however, it is evident that we have a mixed
phenomenon; the symbolism is double. The act becomes desirable because it
is the outward and visible sign of an inwardly experienced abject slavery
to an adored person. But it is also desirable because of intimately sexual
associations in the act itself, as a symbolical detumescence, a simulacrum
of the sexual act, and one which proceeds from the sexual focus itself.
Krafft-Ebing records various cases of masochism in which the
emission of urine on to the body or into the mouth formed the
climax of sexual gratification, as, for instance (_Psychopathia
Sexualis_, English translation, p. 183) in the case of a Russian
official who as a boy had fancies of being bound between the
thighs of a woman, compelled to sleep beneath her nates and to
drink her urine, and in later life experienced the greatest
excitement when practicing the last part of this early
imagination.
In another case, recorded by Krafft-Ebing and by him termed
"ideal masochism" (_Op. cit._, pp. 127-130), the subject from
childhood indulged in voluptuous day-dreams in which he was the
slave of a beautiful mistress who would compel him to obey all
her caprices, stand over him with one foot on his breast, sit on
his face and body, make him wait on her in her bath, or when she
urinated, and sometimes insist on doing this on his face; though
a highly intellectual man, he was always too timid to attempt to
carry any of his ideas into execution; he had been troubled by
nocturnal enuresis up to the age of 20.
Neri, again (_Archivio delle Psicopatie Sessuali_, vol. i, fasc.
7 and 8, 1896), records the case of an Italian masochist who
experienced the greatest pleasure when both urination and
defecation were practiced in this manner by the woman he was
attached to.
In a previous volume of these _Studies_ ("Sexual Inversion,"
History XXVI) I have recorded the masochistic daydreams of a boy
whose impulses were at the same time inverted; in his reveries
"the central fact," he states, "became the discharge of urine
from my lover over my body and limbs, or, if I were very fond of
him, I let it be in my face." In actual life the act of urination
casually witnessed in childhood became the symbol, even the
reality, of the central secret of sex: "I stood rooted and
flushing with downcast eyes till the act was over, and was
conscious for a considerable time of stammering speech and
bewildered faculties.... I was overwhelmed with emotion and could
barely drag my feet from the spot or my eyes from the damp
herbage where he had deposited the waters of secrecy. Even to-day
I cannot dissociate myself from the shuddering charm that moment
had for me."
It is not only the urine and the fæces which may thus acquire a symbolic
fascination and attractiveness under the influence of masochistic
deviations of sexual idealization. In some cases extreme rapture has been
experienced in licking sweating feet. There is, indeed, no excretion or
product of the body which has not been a source of ecstasy: the sweat from
every part of the body, the saliva and menstrual fluid, even the wax from
the ears.
Krafft-Ebing very truly points out (_Psychopathia Sexualis_,
English translation, p. 178) that this sexual scatalogic
symbolism is precisely paralleled by a religious scatalogic
symbolism. In the excesses of devout enthusiasm the ascetic
performs exactly the same acts as are performed in these excesses
of erotic enthusiasm. To mix excreta with the food, to lick up
excrement, to suck festering sores--all these and the like are
acts which holy and venerated women have performed.
Not only the saint, but also the prophet and medicine-man have
been frequently eaters of human excrement; it is only necessary
to refer to the instance of the prophet Ezekiel, who declared
that he was commanded to bake his bread with human dung, and to
the practices of medicine-men at Torres Straits, in whose
training the eating of human excrement takes a recognized part.
(Deities, notably Baal-Phegor, were sometimes supposed to eat
excrement, so that it was natural that their messengers and
representatives among men should do so. As regards Baal-Phegor,
see Dulaure, _Des Divinités Génératrices_, Chapter IV, and J.G.
Bourke, _Scatalogic Rites of All Nations_, p. 241.
See also
Ezekiel, Chapter IV, v. 12, and _Reports Anthropological
Expedition to Torres Straits_, vol. v, p. 321.) It must be added, however, that while the masochist is overcome
by sexual rapture, so that he sees nothing disgusting in his act,
the medicine-man and the ascetic are not so invariably overcome
by religious rapture, and several ascetic writers have referred
to the horror and disgust they experienced, at all events at
first, in accomplishing such acts, while the medicine-men when
novices sometimes find the ordeal too severe and have to abandon
their career. Brénier de Montmorand, while remarking, not without
some exaggeration, that "the Christian ascetics are almost all
eaters of excrement" ("Ascétisme et Mysticisme,"
_Revue
Philosophique_, March, 1904, p. 245), quotes the testimonies of
Marguerite-Marie and Madame Guyon as to the extreme repugnance
which they had to overcome. They were impelled by a merely
intellectual symbolism of self-mortification rather than by the
profoundly felt emotional symbolism which moves the masochist.
Coprophagic acts, whether under the influences of religious
exaltation or of sexual rapture, inevitably excite our disgust.
We regard them as almost insane, fortified in that belief by the
undoubted fact that coprophagia is not uncommon among the insane.
It may, therefore, be proper to point out that it is not so very
long since the ingestion of human excrement was carried out by
our own forefathers in the most sane and deliberate manner. It
was administered by medical practitioners for a great number of
ailments, apparently with entirely satisfactory results. Less
than two centuries ago, Schurig, who so admirably gathered
together and arranged the medical lore of his own and the
immediately preceding ages, wrote a very long and detailed
chapter, "De Stercoris Humani Usu Medico"
(_Chylologia_, 1725,
cap. XIII; in the Paris _Journal de Médecine_ for February 19,
1905, there appeared an article, which I have not seen, entitled
"Médicaments oubliées: l'urine et la fiente humaine.") The
classes of cases in which the drug was found beneficial would
seem to have been extremely various. It must not be supposed that
it was usually ingested in the crude form. A common method was to
take the fæces of boys, dry them, mix them with the best honey,
and administer an electuary. (At an earlier period such drugs
appear to have met with some opposition from the Church, which
seems to have seen in them only an application of magic; thus I
note that in Burchard's remarkable Penitential of the fourteenth
century, as reproduced by Wasserschleben, 40 days'
penance is
prescribed for the use of human urine or excrement as a medicine.
Wasserschleben _Die Bussordnungen der
Abendländlichen Kirche_, p.
651.)
The urolagnia of masochism is not a simple phenomenon; it embodies a
double symbolism: on the one hand a symbolism of self-abnegation, such as
the ascetic feels, on the other hand a symbolism of transferred sexual
emotion. Krafft-Ebing was disposed to regard all cases in which a
scatalogical sexual attraction existed as due to "latent masochism." Such
a point of view is quite untenable. Certainly the connection is common,
but in the majority of cases of slightly marked scatalogical fetichism no
masochism is evident. And when we bear in mind the various considerations,
already brought forward, which show how widespread and clearly realized is
the natural and normal basis furnished for such symbolism, it becomes
quite unnecessary to invoke any aid from masochism.
There is ample
evidence to show that, either as a habitual or more usually an occasional
act, the impulse to bestow a symbolic value on the act of urination in a
beloved person, is not extremely uncommon; it has been noted of men of
high intellectual distinction; it occurs in women as well as men; when
existing in only a slight degree, it must be regarded as within the normal
limits of variation of sexual emotion.
The occasional cases in which the urine is drunk may possibly
suggest that the motive lies in the properties of the fluid
acting on the system. Support for this supposition might be found
in the fact that urine actually does possess, apart altogether
from its magic virtues embodied in folk-lore, the properties of a
general stimulant. In composition (as Masterman first pointed
out) "beef-tea differs little from healthy urine,"
containing
exactly the same constituents, except that in beef-tea there is
less urea and uric acid. Fresh urine--more especially that of
children and young women--is taken as a medicine in nearly all
parts of the world for various disorders, such as epistaxis,
malaria and hysteria, with benefit, this benefit being almost
certainly due to its qualities as a general stimulant and
restorative. William Salmon's _Dispensatory_, 1678
(quoted in
_British Medical Journal_, April 21, 1900, p. 974), shows that in
the seventeenth century urine still occupied an important place
as a medicine, and it frequently entered largely into the
composition of Aqua Divina.
Its use has been known even in England in the nineteenth century.
(Masterman, _Lancet_, October 2, 1880; R. Neale,
"Urine as a
Medicine," _Practitioner_, November, 1881; Bourke brings together
a great deal of evidence as to the therapeutic uses of urine in
his _Scatalogic Rites_, especially pp. 331-335; Lusini has shown
that normal urine invariably increases the frequency of the heart
beats, _Archivio di Farmacologia_, fascs. 19-21, 1893.)
But it is an error to suppose that these facts account for the
urolagnic drinking of urine. As in the gratification of a normal
sexual impulse, the intense excitement of gratifying a scatalogic
sexual impulse itself produces a degree of emotional stimulation