Masters on Zoo
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Texte original
Masters on Zoo
Note from Packman® : Having been handed this Doccument in a commpressed style of composition, I have given it Paragraphic Spaces. Don't blame the Author! Also, the person who Edited it to the form I recieved lacked the power of Itallics. Thus there were lots of *things written* thus. I've put them back into proper Italics. EXCEPT the Anthrpoid quote, directly below. That too should be in Italics. But the rest of the work was so damn long and fatiguing I just can't be arsed! You know now. So just get on and enjoy it. I haven't altered a single word of the Text, naturally. It was a pleasure to work with and I'm sure you'll become absorbed in the read - even if he don't like " Real Zoophiles "! :eek: Packman. 2002
Bestiality section excerpted from:
FORBIDDEN SEXUAL BEHAVIOUR and MORALITY by R. E. L. MASTERS (c) The Julian Press (1st edition 1966)
"The anthropoid is more luckless and unintelligent than animals, and the remedy for his ills is not progress, going forward, which is always to his grave, but turning backwards. He has extirpated most of the beasts that he no longer has as tutors. As a result he does not know whether to cohabit with woman, with man, or with sheep, and there are some who are enormously aroused by the sight of a mare. There is a breed of dog that will copulate with a wolf, and it is believed that a species of dog is derived from the tiger, and there is the Babylonian cameleopard; but, for the most part, the stallion seeks the female of its kind, and the elephant hankers afters the same sort of animal that bore him."
PRELIMINARY REMARKS
Artists, looking upon the phenomenon of bestiality - human-animal sex relationships - from the vantage point of aesthetics, have perceived it as beautiful or ugly, tender or terrible, grotesque or merely ludicrous. Theologians, bowing to Biblical prohibitions and basing their judgements on the conception of man as a spiritual being and of the animal as a merely carnal one, have regarded the same phenomenon as both a violation of Biblical edicts and a degradation of man, with the result that the act of bestiality has been castigated and anathematised as sinful, unnatural, and depraved. Present-day scientists, basing their opinions upon extensive and impeccable data, have concluded that man's desire to mate with members of species other than his own is quite natural, and parallels tendencies to be found among other representatives of the animal world. Therefore, science has decreed, bestiality may be condemned only in terms of arbitrary ethical and metaphysical doctrines and not as a violation of the natural order of things.
There are, of course, a host of other perspectives and blending of perspectives. My own is closer to the aesthetic than the theologian or even the biological-scientific viewpoint. From this basically aesthetic perspective, but utilizing certain insights and tools of various systems and schools of philosophical and psychological thought, I have undertaken to survey and analyse the meaning and content of the sexual relations of humans with beasts. The aesthetic vantage point from which I have proceeded has partially and sometimes largely determined not only the matter but also the manner of the writing. Thus, there is both levity and gravity, which extend not just to the subject matter and the conclusions drawn from it, but also to the tone, the style, and the vocabulary of the presentation. While this has seemed to me to be the method most consistent with the pursuit of that chimera objectivity, I am aware that it may also lead to a certain amount of confusion - an eventuality I hope to forestall by voicing these prefatory words of caution and explanation.
Undoubtedly some of the historical material included here is dubious and quite possibly apocryphal, and some of the constructions I have placed on the material are debatable. It must be remembered that in dealing with remote historical data the separation of fact from fantasy is frequently impossible. Fantasy is often scarcely less important and illuminating than the fact. And any constructions placed upon any data of this kind, particularly when the subject is such a controversial and emotive one, will always be debatable. Lastly, so far as these preliminary remarks are concerned, I would like to say that I have taken the late Dr. Kinsey at his word as regards the relatively great incidence of "animal contacts" in rural areas - and conceive of my labour as primarily a contribution to the well-being of the world's peasants. But I hope and trust, of course, that the work will also prove utilitarian, edifying, and of interest elsewhere.
PREHISTORY OF BESTIALITY
Since prehistoric man was pre-historic, it is doubtless unnecessary to say that we know nothing of his sexual behaviour - save that he managed to copulate and thus reproduce his own kind in sufficient numbers to prevent the extinction of genus Homo. The temptation to speculate about the sexual and other behaviour of prehistoric man is great - as so many writers have demonstrated, by succumbing; but it seems best to resolutely resist the seduction save for a few brief and rather conventional remarks.
Early man was in all likelihood the possessor of a sexual instinct urging him on to coition and the resultant perpetuation of his kind. Differing little if at all from other animals in this respect, he could be assumed to have been guided instinctually to perform his sexual acts largely if not exclusively with members of the opposite sex of his own species. When his biological sex urges were compellingly present but the usual means of gratifying them were not at hand, he probably looked about - again like at least some other animals - for a substitute. It is in such a situation that bestiality and conceivably homosexuality and masturbation as well, might first be expected to occur. {1}
It is safe enough to speculate that only want of opportunity or lack of inclination (deriving sometimes, no doubt, from not having thought of it) would have deterred early man from promiscuous sexual intercourse with other animals. Religious, magical, moral, and especially aesthetic objections would scarcely have entered the picture - so that danger, inconvenience and anatomical discrepancies would have been, once bestiality figured as a choice, the most likely obstacles. Having no image of himself as a spiritual being, and probably not even recognizing any mental distinctions between himself and other animals, it is likely that prehistoric man differentiated between the earth's creatures only in terms of size, configuration, degree of threat to his physical safety, and - in some cases, as his intellectual capacity developed - adaptability to his personal cravings and requirements.
There could have been none of that sense of pride in his humanity - with accompanying contempt for beings of a lower order - which later, along with certain scriptural doctrines and theological speculations, led man to view bestiality as a descent, a degradation, and a sin. Having discovered the possibility that other creatures could be used for sexual intercourse, early man was likely to have made many such attempts - though it is doubtful that he was so sexually omnivorous as the Christian and Jewish Adam, who, rabbinical interpreters of the Old Testament tell us, had intercourse with every creature before God finally hit upon the idea of woman and created Eve.
Eventually, the experience would have taught man that certain beasts were suitable for sex, just as certain beasts were suitable for food, while others were no good for this purpose, or too much trouble, or too dangerous to come by. Bestiality, as other facets of man's behaviour, would have tended then, eventually towards limitations and stereotype. The extensions of these self-imposed practical limitations would have come only when, centuries and millennia later, the social units of mankind would have learned the lesson that in the suppression of sexual behaviour (though not of sexual desires) lies one of the secrets of the acquisition and preservation of individual and institutional authority and power.
PRIMITIVES
Bestiality is not - though the generalization must allow for a good many exceptions - a sophisticated variety of sexual behaviour. It is not unreasonable to suppose that prehistoric man, despite his limited intelligence and imagination, discovered this practice rather early in his career and, with the passage of time, even refined and developed its possibilities. After man had reached the level achieved by some of the primitive peoples with whom we are familiar today, bestiality may well have been one of the regular, if scarcely preferred, features of sexual life.
A factor contributing to this would have been the domestication of animals - dogs, horses, cattle, and other creatures with which sexual intercourse presents few problems, and which are, above all, readily available to the man or woman who wishes thus to use them. "Doing what comes naturally," primitive man did not have to worry about policemen arresting him and officialdom prosecuting and sentencing him for "monstrous crimes against nature." On the other hand, even some primitive societies are not altogether lacking in disapproval of such sexual practices as bestiality - partially perhaps as a result of concern over the possible threat to population increase, a consideration which also played a major role in determining many of the old Jewish anti-sexual prohibitions which anachronistically still reach out across the centuries to govern us today.
Malinowski, who noted that the Trobianders have no laws against bestiality (or homosexuality, masturbation, exhibitionism, etc.), tells us that offenders are nonetheless subjected to punishment in the form of derision and contempt: "No one likes to penetrate excrement," says the Trobiand Islander (ignorant of the predilections of certain celebrated sodomists), and "No one likes a dog better than a woman." Meaning, of course, that one ought not to enjoy such things. Other primitive peoples of modern times have also been observed to disapprove, though only mildly, of such deviant forms of sexual behaviour as bestiality and homosexuality - and somewhat like the Trobianders they express their lack of approval by poking fun at the miscreant rather than by officially condemning and punishing him.
It is somewhat saddening to remark that the primitives display a more tolerant and possibly even more enlightened approach to sexual behaviour than do the inhabitants of the so-called civilized countries - though it would be even more civilized, sophisticated, and admirably charitable if the deviant behaviour were officially and generally ignored and, in the civilized nations, help made unobtrusively available to those who might choose to accept it. This is, of course, not likely to occur soon; contemporary societies continue to manifest - by their desire to punish - the neurotic impulses, repressed cravings, irrational beliefs and attitudes, and similar phenomena of the psyche which continue to dominate them.
ANTIQUITY
With continuing though hopefully not castrate conciseness, we will look here only briefly at the ancient world, arbitrarily limiting the discussion to the Egyptian, Greek, and Roman civilizations - which will be mentioned elsewhere in the text as well. Bestiality, it will have to be sufficient to say, existed as a rather widespread practice in all the nations of antiquity of which we have adequate records. Where it is not specifically mentioned, it may be legitimately inferred on the basis of the over-all evidence. (I bring up this point because I should not wish to be accused of exposing to likely censure and malediction only the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans - as if I were an Arab, insisting that all that is erotically irregular in this world came out of Turkey.)
In ancient Egypt, the animal aspects of the gods insured that bestiality would be practiced both for religious and magical purposes. The representation of the Egyptian gods as beings of part-human forms was linked - a further impetus to bestiality - to the belief that living animals partook of the divinity of the gods and goddesses whose forms they shared. {2} Humanity is indebted to Herodotus for the information that religious bestiality was practiced in Egypt - the most famous example being of course the copulations of women with goats. Later, Voltaire spoke of sexual relations between Egyptian women and sacred goats, and cited Plutarch and Pindar as his sources.
Another and still later commentator upon this matter was the scholar and anthropologist Lang, who advised us that the Egyptian women submitted to he-goats while the "men committed the sin of impurity with she-goats." The most famous or infamous example of this was, as is well known, the Goat of Mendes, who was thought to be the incarnation of the procreative deity. In the temple at Mendes, countless persons engaged in worshipful bestiality with goats especially trained for the purpose. {3} Besides the goat, the Egyptians were known to carnally consort with the Hamadryas baboon, a semi-divine and picturesque creature whose talents also included assuming postures of prayer in the temples, waiting on tables, and removing weeds from garden plots.
(Elsewhere in the Middle East, and the East as well, the baboon was favoured. At El Yemen, trained baboons were popular sex partners with men and women alike. Similarly, in the Nile and Indus Valleys, monkeys were instructed in the art of manipulating the genitals of both sexes. In India, Hindu holy men were much addicted to bestiality with sacred monkeys, and sometimes with sacred cows as well. It is recorded that dog-faced baboons once fornicated with women throughout Egypt and the length and breadth of the Arab world.)
It should not be supposed that sacred goats and semi-divine baboons exhausted Egyptian ingenuity. To mention only one further example, it has often been related that the Egyptians mastered the art of sexual congress with the crocodile - this act being accomplished, say authorities, by turning the creature on its back, which renders it incapable of resisting penetration. These reptilian cohabitations, it was held by the superstitious, would bring prosperity and restore the potency of men whose powers, whether owing to age or debauchery, were flagging.
Turning to the Greeks, we recall with Xenophon how, during the retreat of the Ten Thousand, there were abominable unions with goats. A further indication that the Greek - who perhaps acquired his predilection from the Egyptian - was sexually concerned with the goat, is the satyr, a mythical being, half-goat, half-man, who was noted for his virility and lasciviousness, and who exercised it freely with humans, nymphs, and other creatures. This leads us to the realm of Greek mythology, which is considered by scholars to provide the best evidence for the thesis that the incidence of bestiality among the ancient Greeks was high, and that the attitude toward this form of sexual expression was somewhat less than severely condemnatory.
For example, Norman Haire (Hymen) has noticed that "since the Greek myths contain many stories of gods who assumed the shape of animals in order to mate with mortals, we may judge that even bestiality was not regarded as revolting." We may probably, without wanton imaginative excess, go a bit farther than Dr. Haire and assert that bestiality appealed greatly to the Greek imagination - and not too infrequently to the Greek's gonads as well. Of the Greek gods who in animal form mated with mortals, everyone recalls Zeus, who appeared to Europa as a bull, {4} to Leda as a swan, and to Persephone as a serpent. Or Apollo, who in serpent form made love to Atys.
We recall, too, a goodly number of other instances of bestial intercourse related by the historians and mythologists: Among them, the mating of Aristo Ephesius with a she-ass, Semiramis, legendary foundress of Babylon, with a stallion, and Fulvius with a mare. From the union of Pasiphae and the bull was born the Minotaur, and the mythologists credited other bestial unions with bringing them into the world. Satyrs, Centaurs, and other strange and monstrous creatures. {5} Robert Burton (Anatomy of Melancholy) adds to the list Sphinxes, saying that "not only men go with goats, swine and horses, but women are inflamed with mad passions for beasts, whence Minotaurs, Centaurs, Silvanuses, Sphinxes, etc. . . ." (Of both mythological bestiality and the resulting monstrous issues I will have considerably more to say in another place.)
Of the three great antique civilizations here dealt with, the Roman was the most lavish and factual in its recording of both public and private bestiality. Sometimes animal intercourse was the practice of shepherds, shepherdesses, and other rustic bumpkins; sometimes a whole population was given to it - as in the case of the Sybarites, noted for their sodomies and copulations with canines (as were the Moors, rightly or wrongly, in later times); on other occasions bestiality was a spectator sport, as in the case of the exhibitions staged at the Roman Games; sometimes it was the voluptuous indulgence of noble Roman ladies; and sometimes even emperors were involved. (Nero, disguised as a wild beast, once invaded the arena at the Games to assault members of both sexes, a performance he concluded by casting off his costume and publicly falling into the embrace of Doryphorous, his male lover.)
Several writers - Martial among them - have related that Roman women inserted snakes into their sexual parts, not only as a means of arriving at orgasm, but also as a way of keeping cool and averting noisome genital stenches in the summertime. According to Lucian, the snakes were also taught to suckle the nipples of the women's breasts. Births consequent upon the flagitious fornications of human females with ophidian paramours were of course widely reported.
For the Roman Games, male animals of all sorts were trained from the earliest possible age to copulate with and even forcibly ravish girls and women. Bulls, giraffes, leopards, cheetahs, wild boars, zebras, stallions, jack-asses, huge dogs, various kinds of apes, and other animals were taught - not without considerable effort on the part of their trainers - to perform these functions. Some of the more adaptable and enthusiastic ones were further tutored to commit sodomy on human males and females. Especially popular at the Games were representations of scenes from the sexual lives of the gods, a particular favourite being Pasiphae and the Bull.
Needless to say, the bulls, stallions, and giraffes, and some of the other larger animals, inflicted terrible suffering, sometimes even death, on their victims, who were often virgins and not infrequently small children. One appreciatively received spectacle is said to have been staged at which a hundred tiny blonde girls were raped simultaneously by a horde of baboons. Chimpanzees and ferocious but colourful mandrills, made drunk by wine and inflamed by the odour of females of their kind, were loosed upon girls whose genitals had been drenched with the urine of female chimps and mandrills. On occasion, as a stirring climax to all of this, the beasts were permitted to kill, and if they wished, devour their human victims after assaulting them sexually. Such acts invariably brought down the house at the Games, and were even more popular than the often staged but never-wearied-of human sex orgies.
We need not descend from these heights of pageantry and lascivious frenzy to consider the mundane frolics of rustics with such commonplace creatures as goats, sheep, and ponies. From the ancient world up through our own time, in all countries - though more frequently in some than in others - bestiality was practiced, thought about, dreamed of, and emerged as myth, fairy tale, folklore, literature, painting, and sculpture. At the same time, it claimed its human and animal victims. Among the Jews, the zooerast (bestialist) was stoned to death. In the Middle Ages, he was burned, perhaps as a reminder to other citizens that burning was the fate of the Cities of the Plain.
In 1468, Jean Beisse, accused of bestiality with a cow on one occasion, with a goat on another, was first hanged, then burned. The animal parties to the crimes were burned also. In 1539, Guillaume Garnier, charged with sodomizing a she-dog, was ordered strangled after he confessed (under torture) to that abomination. The dog was burned, along with the trial records, which were too horrible and potentially dangerous to be permitted to exist. In 1601, Claudine de Culam, a young girl of sixteen, was convicted of copulating with a dog. Both the girl and the dog were first hanged, then strangled, and finally burned. In 1735, Francois Borniche was charged with sexual intercourse with animals. It was greatly feared that "his infamous debauches may corrupt the young men." He was imprisoned. There is no record of his release.
And so on, up to the present. The sentences grow lighter; that is, there are fewer executions and lifelong imprisonments. Nonetheless, the individuals are destroyed. Where the law is lenient, society still takes its revenge: public scorn and hatred, ostracism, withholding of work. Always, once the matter has been brought to the attention of the community, the reprisals are vicious, unrelenting, remorseless, and total. The cases cited above are of course illustrative of the extremity of the penalties assessed. Many, many others were also "brought to justice." Despite this, bestiality is far from eliminated, and perhaps not even deterred.
At times, as during the witchcraft epidemic, and again in the eighteenth century, the act was especially commonplace. During these more sophisticated interludes, pleasure was less the end pursued by the beastialist than it had formerly. Rather, bestiality became an act of revolt or defiance against God, or the state, or other authority. It was practiced as a vice, both to show one's contempt for official morality and to experience the sense of sinfulness which intensifies all pleasures. When such ends as these are pursued, bestiality becomes the practice of nobility, the intellectuals, and the artists, whose fantasies, particularly, are engaged. When, at other periods, it is pursued merely as a means of appeasing the sexual appetite - usually in the absence of an obtainable human sex partner - it is, as Havelock Ellis observed, a practice of clodhoppers.
MODERN TIMES
In modern times, the practice of bestiality has been reported with a greater thoroughness than was the case in the ancient world, and this despite the fact that in the West at least the practitioners have grown considerably more furtive. Certainly, the past two hundred years have seen nothing to compare with the spectacular bestiality of the Roman Games, a phenomenon unique in all of history. The "exhibition" persists, even down to the present day, but it is conducted stealthily, in defiance of law and society (though sometimes with the well-remunerated connivance of the police), and most frequently for secret circles of debauchees, wealthy tourists, and the like.
The covertness of Western bestiality is not quite rivalled by the less inhibited or more impassioned zooerasts of Africa and the Middle and Far East. This is especially the case with the primitive and less-than-civilized peoples whose relatively overt indulgence in bestiality has been widely and reliably remarked. Among the Manghabei of Madagascar, for example, bestiality with calves, kids, and cows has been observed to be practiced by children and adults alike. Among the Malayans, the Battaks of Sumatra were renowned for their addiction to bestiality and other extracoital carousals. And in Kamchatka, it was said of the women that they were much given to engaging in erotic practices with dogs. The Negroes of Zanzibar - remarkable for apparently developing all of the so-called vices of advanced civilizations on their own - practiced and perhaps still do, amongst the multiplicity of their perversions, sodomitic intercourse with nanny goats.
Felix Bryk, taking note of an interesting custom, reported that the "Suaheli and Arabians of the coast" were wont to necrophilously sodomize slain sea-cows, or dugong (manatees), an habituation which caused the missionaries much spiritual distress "This bestial lechery," Bryk writes, {6} "is motivated, according to the reports of many, by a superstition . . . it was absolutely necessary for the hunter of the dugong to cohabit with the animal he had slain, or at his next catch he would be dragged into the depths of the sea by another animal. But cohabitation with his prey would, on the other hand, insure him against such an accident on the open sea.
This sodomy, consequently, is part of magic, as a preventive act of safeguarding. "Whether caused by superstition or not, according to many reports the dugong, when dragged up on land, is to be mounted by none but fishermen. This is such a general occurrence that the people who buy the meat of the sea-cow make the Islamic fisherman swear by the Koran that he has had no sexual intercourse with the sea-cow he is offering for sale. They will not buy the meat from him unless he swears. They do not want the flesh of a creature that has served man as a beast of pleasure. That is cannibalism." That the fisherman should be obliged to take this particular oath on the Koran is, in a way, ironic.
Unlike most of the holy books of mankind, those omniscient Baedekers in life in this world and entry into the next, the Koran makes no mention of sexual relations with animals. Since the Prophet did not specifically prohibit bestiality, the Arabs have never taken quite so condemnatory an attitude towards the practice, and indeed a popular Arab saying had it that "The pilgrimage to Mecca is not complete without copulating with the camel." (It should be added that the camel is a notoriously unfriendly beast, little given to affectionate dalliance of any sort with humans, and perhaps the saying hints at a greater incidence of such activity than has ever really been the case.)
So far as the Turks are concerned, it is said - by the Arabs of course - that they are not merely ravening rapists and maniacal pederasts, addicted to every erotic enormity possible with one's fellow human, but that there is also no bird or beast, dead or living, with which they have not at least attempted bestiality. (It is well known that they are iniquitously enamoured of their mares which, moreover, they sodomize, rather than using in the less reprehensible vaginal way.) It may here be noted that the same has been said of German, especially Prussian, cavalrymen, and that Hungarian Hussars have also been victims of this possible canard.
The Egyptian shepherd boy, like his counterpart in the ancient world, is said to have been on occasion more than permissibly familiar with his ewes - a charge shepherds of other lands have also had to bear up under. The Egyptian, however was said to especially favour fellatio, performed upon him by suckling lambs and goats, and if the animals required special inducement he would rub honey or candy on his penis in order to provide it. G. Robinson Lees asserts that as recently as the early part of this century the nomads' practice of copulating with their cattle constituted an ordinary feature of pastoral life among the Palestinian Arabs.
Raphael Patai (Sex and Family Life In the Bible) says that bestiality is found only rarely among the Rwala Bedouins, occasionally in Central Arabia, and frequently among the semi-Bedouins of Northern Palestine and in Mecca. In Morocco, he adds illuminatingly, the young boys practice bestiality with she-asses in order to make the penis grow. Grown-up men are ridiculed for the practiced, but they are not punished as long as they confine their amours to their own livestock.
We should not take leave of this part of the world without pausing to consider certain behaviour brought to our attention by Allen Edwardes (The Jewel In the Lotus): "Neglected or pathologic women, especially in Abyssinia and the Sudan, smuggled dog-faced apes (girds) into the harem. These were lusty brutes, known to kill men and rape women in many parts of the country; and an old Egyptian saying declared: 'Nothing poketh and stroketh, nor lusteth after a female, more strenuously than the baboon.' Trained, the cynocephalus, drilling vigorously, endured much longer than the hardiest eunuch. The only shortcoming was that the penis of the baboon proved more stiff and sturdy than long and thick, and concubines demanded ample girth for proper response. Yet those who could achieve venereal paroxysm by friction of the vaginal orifice and external genitalia were greatly enamoured of monkeys.
Thus the Arab, student of medicine, definitely held that nymphomania was due to black and yellow worms in the vagina: black being bred by the stroking of a Negro, and yellow by the strokings of a domiciled baboon. Many such women having animal contacts were considered saints and hooree yehs (nymphs of heaven)."
Turning westward, we may well be surprised, even astonished, after all this, to find the learned sexological pioneer Krafft-Ebing declaring that bestiality is, for the human female, limited to intercourse with dogs. In Psychopathia Sexualis, that still instructive catalogue of man's sexual vagaries, Krafft-Ebing cites one such case (of intercourse with canines) of which he had knowledge - that of a Parisian woman who "showed herself in the sexual act with a trained bulldog, to a secret circle of roués, at ten francs a head."
Herzog in his Medical Jurisprudance, which goes into some detail concerning the various bestial practices of both men and women, is better, though still inadequately, informed where the female is concerned:
"Bestiality in men is encountered in many forms. Horses, cows, donkeys, pigs, goats, sheep, dogs, and barnyard fowls are the animals most frequently used. In male animals the rectum is generally used, although in one reported case a man used the nostrils of a horse. In female animals the penetration may be into either the rectum or the vagina. In birds the penis is introduced into the cloaca of the bird and coitus thus accomplished. In many of these cases the animals used either sicken or die and an examination as to the cause may find severe injury done to these parts and throw suspicion on someone who may (then) be caught in the act. "
In most cases where four-footed animals are used in bestiality the man plays the active part in pedicato, but there are instances where the animal is the active agent, the human male taking the part of the pathic; thus there is the case recorded where a farmer's rectum was seriously injured because he used a bull as the active agent. "In other cases large dogs are used either for the active or passive agent in pederasty. Where the dog is used as the active agent, if the act is interrupted before the dog has ejaculated, owing to the swelling of the glans of the penis, which occurs during coitus and which disappears only after ejaculation, the sudden withdrawal of the penis while the glans is still swollen will often cause a laceration of the anus.
" Bestiality in women is a great deal more prevalent than it is in men." (The findings of the late Dr. Kinsey are in contradiction to this view, though they are of course confined to the U.S., while Herzog's is perhaps a more global perspective.) "Not only lap-dogs and large dogs, both male and female, can be used for cunnilingus, but large male dogs are frequently used for actual coitus. Where large dogs are used for actual coitus in novices to this practice, there are generally marks from the claws of the dog, which can be found on the abdomen and on the inside of both thighs, in parallel arrangement. "
Not only dogs have been used by women in the practice of bestiality, but a case is related where a number of congenial souls amused themselves with fishes, by inserting the tail ends of the live fish into the vulva and then by pressing the head of the fish, would start it to squirming, thus tickling the vulva. Stekel relates a case where a young lady managed to use flies for her purpose. She would lie down on a sofa and separating her thighs would smear honey on and in the vulva. The flies thus attracted by the honey would tickle her until her sexual appetite was appeased. (The smearing of honey on the male genitalia in order to experience titillation by flies is also known to have occurred.
The bites of insects, particularly bees, have been solicited by males both masochistically to enjoy the painful sensations, and in order to cause the penis to swell and thus enlarge the organ, after which sexual intercourse was engaged in before the swelling had a chance to recede. Female "intercourse" with insects, it may be added is said to have been the exotic piece de resistance of erotic exhibitions. One such clandestine exhibition - doubtless the story is a fabrication - is said to have occurred at the World's Fair in Chicago, where the theme was "A Century of Progress." Even if there was such an exhibition - and whether actual or imaginary, it temporarily enriched the American vernacular of the 'Thirties with the term "fly-fucking" - there is no reason to suppose that it necessarily enjoyed the imprimatur of Fair authorities.)
Since the Herzog discussion calls attention to the matter, it might be well at this point to consider briefly the dangers associated with bestiality, and these are not all legal ones. Although the odds weigh heavily against such an occurrence, there are quite a few cases on record of individuals injured as a result of having sexual relations with animals, especially dogs. Zooerastic (anal) intercourse with the larger animals in which the human plays the passive role is of course likely to result in injury to the man or woman involved, and this is particularly true when the individual is not an habitual passive sodomist and the anus has not made the accommodation to pedication noted by Tarnowsky (Pederasty in Europe), and others.
For this reason, passive anal intercourse with animals is rare, apart from the intentional torture of human beings by such means, examples of which are discussed elsewhere (and which is also now, happily, rare). But there is on record (it must be a different case from that cited by Herzog, or else a later version) the death of a farmer resulting from his attempt to have himself buggered by a bull. A few similar instances, involving bulls, stallions, and other large animals have also been reported. The dog, probably the animal most frequently used in this country for sexual purposes, may inflict serious injuries when he is the active agent in either sodomy or coitus, especially when the act is prematurely (before discharge and detumescence) interrupted.
This results from the peculiar and apparently inutile structure of the dog's penis, which has a massive ball or knot near its midpoint. Once the dog's phallus has been inserted into either vagina or anus, and the ball has become engorged, painless withdrawal is almost impossible until after the dog ejaculates, when shrinkage and flaccidity of both ball and penis occur. On occasion, in copulation with another dog, the sphincter of the bitch will clench around the base of the dog's penis, preventing the withdrawal of blood from the organ, and thus maintaining tumescence - and it is then that dogs become locked painfully together, as many persons have seen to occur.
Eugene Burns (The Sex Life of Wild Animals) observes that the function of the knot on the dog's penis - a structural oddity he shares with the fox, the coyote and the wolf - is mysterious, since all of these animals are able to ejaculate without the knot's becoming tumescent. Indeed, its only function seems to be the infelicitous one of causing the male and female beasts to become more inextricably joined together, a state which is invariably productive of suffering and has even been known to cause the deaths of the animals. As mentioned, most human injuries resulting from intercourse with canines occur when the participants are surprised or startled and a forced withdrawal of the dog's erect organ is attempted.
In one case, a woman was surprised in Washington copulating with a large English mastiff, and when the terrified couple endeavoured to hastily sever the connection, the dog's phallus was so forcefully removed as to bring about a fatal haemorrhage in the woman. In another case, at Omaha, Nebraska, a sixteen-year-old boy had himself sodomized by a dog and when the separation was attempted the dog "tore through the sphincter and an inch into the gluteus muscles."
Havelock Ellis (Studies In the Psychology of Sex) mentions the above cases, and another involving a girl:
"In a Missouri case, which I verified, a smart, pretty, well-educated country girl was found with a profuse offensive vaginal discharge which had been present for about a week, coming on suddenly. After washing the external genitals and opening the labia three rents were discovered, one through the fourchette and two through the left nymphae. The vagina was excessively congested and covered with points bleeding on the slightest irritation. The patient confessed that one day while playing with the genitals of a large dog, she became excited and thought she would have slight coitus. After the dog had made an entrance she was unable to free herself from him, as he clasped her so firmly with his forelegs. The penis became so swollen that the dog could not free himself, although for more than an hour she made persistent efforts to do so." (Sic)
Departing from the painful subject just dealt with, we note that Kinsey's inevitable finding (Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male and Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female) that bestiality is more common in the country than in the city was anticipated in the nineteenth century by Pastor Wagner who, of course, found the same to be true for the German Empire of his day. Wagner published the results of his survey of rustic behaviour in a massive work, which, as the sexologist Moll observed, destroyed once and for all the myth of rural innocence.
Dr. Kinsey, in scrutinizing the sexual outlets of his American contemporaries, came to the conclusion that ". . . no other type of sexual activity . . . accounts for a smaller proportion of the total outlet of the total population" than bestiality. (This, it should be understood, excludes some of the more esoteric practices.) "In the total population," Kinsey found, "only one male in twelve or fourteen (estimated at about 8 percent) ever has sexual experience with animals." Among farm boys he found, however, that between 40 to 50 percent had some kind of sexual contact with animals at some period of their lives, while in some specific Western localities the incidence reached 65 percent or even higher.
He believed the incidence for the total population would be considerably greater if city youths had freer access to animal contacts - a view backed up by his finding that city boys visiting farms, where the animals are available for the act, tended to have such contacts much more frequently than while in the city. Kinsey found the total incidence of animal contacts among females to be far lower than among males - only about 3.6 percent of the female population having experienced such contacts. He noted that one percent of the females fantasised about sexual contacts with animals while masturbating, and that another one percent had dreamed of intercourse with animals.
Kinsey also provided confirming data for the view that the sexual contact between male humans and male animals, either anal or oral, with the human either the active or the passive agent, may be a homosexual relationship as far as the participating individual is concerned. Homosexuals also, it has been reported, are sometimes able to obtain gratification simply by masturbating the male animal (usually a dog).
On the basis of the conclusion that bestial relationships may be also homosexual ones, we are probably entitled to suppose that acts of cunnilingus between human females and female animals may be homosexual. Where cunnilingus is concerned, the active agent is almost always the animal. Cases of human females performing cunnilingus on female animals do not seem to have come often to the public notice, but doubtless occur. (It is somewhat better known that the fellatio of animals takes place, and that both human males and human females engage in the practice, though again the data are few and the event no doubt a comparative rarity.)
A point Kinsey does not mention, unless I have missed it, and which seems to have been neglected by other writers as well, is that while male bestiality is primarily the province of the country-dweller, female bestiality is more likely to be the province of the city-dweller, if only for the reason that the female can satisfy her desires with creatures adapted to city life - principally, the dog - while males are much better matched anatomically with such creatures as goats, sheep, ponies, mares and heifers. Probably, too, the city woman, being more sophisticated erotically, will be more inclined to experiment than the rural woman, who tends at once to lack privacy and to be more greatly affected by taboos.
Before turning to some of the legal vagaries historically associated with bestiality, there is one other matter to be touched upon: The American legend of the Western sheep-herder and his knee-boots, a piece of folklore no history of bestiality, however concise, should ever omit to consider." "A.F.N.," the able editor-translator of Dubois-Desaulle's Bestiality, the only full-length work on this subject available in English, notes the legend and comments on it with appropriate good humour:
"There is no necessity of limiting this practice (bestial intercourse with the flocks) to Egypt; our own West has been and still is justly famous for its caprine amours. In fact, in some sections the very term sheepherder carries a contemptible connotation. Might I pause, however, without throwing myself open to the charge of facetiousness, to reflect on the infinitely greater advantages enjoyed by our contemporary Western satyrs? For the unharnessed Egyptian goatherd, the restraining of a recalcitrant she-goat must at times have present problems well nigh insurmountable. But the well-known device of our sheep-herders, whose knee-boots readily permit the introduction of the hind legs of their woolly inamorata, at once impresses us with the advantages the progress of civilization has brought about in all fields."
Like A.F.N. (A. F. Niemoller?), I am inclined to think that the knee-boot represents for the shepherd zooerast or zoophile, a certain advance and advantage over the barefoot approach of his precursors. Still, there are reasons to think that A.F.N. may be unduly enthusiastic and optimistic. For example, one would suppose that the hoof introduced into the boot, and which would have to remain at shin-level or thereabouts in order to bring human and animal genitalia into essential contiguity, would be less than comfortable. What the barefoot or at least bootless shepherd did about this disparity of elevation of the respective private parts has always troubled me. Whether he placed the rear feet of the animal on a pedestal, or whether he himself squatted, I have never been able to learn.
Either way, the posture would seem to be an awkward one, and the necessity for restraining the beast would add to the awkwardness, and increase the chances of the shepherd's receiving a nasty kick, which must often have happened. It is said that when the knee-boots are worn the sheep-herder neither has to worry about being kicked nor needs to restrain the animal since a ewe in this situation, one is told, will back up rather than go forward, thus facilitating the bestialist's efforts to fathom her depths. No doubt the sheepherder, and the goatherd before him, found satisfactory solutions to all the problems I have raised. To the uninitiated, however, it must seem that the game could scarcely be worth the candle.
"Lex semper dabit remidium" "THE LAW WILL ALWAYS GIVE A REMEDY"
Prophets, kings, philosophers, legislators, and other would-be moral didacts and dictators of all times and places have laid down regulations and penalties aimed at suppressing the omnipresent practice of bestiality. Some of these edicts purport to be the revealed Word of the Almighty. Others, more modestly, claim merely to be the immutable, highest, and most sublime expressions of wisdom and ethics devised by mortal man.
It is not proposed here to examine each of the laws and ethical pronouncements conceived for the purpose of bringing to justice or branding as depraved, damned and delinquent the hapless zoophile. With few exceptions, to examine a handful of these is to capture the flavour of them all. This becomes evident if we begin with the Jewish law of the Old Testament and then leapfrog across the centuries to the current U.S. statutes (which differ mainly in that the death penalty has been reluctantly abandoned for lesser retributions, and in that the animal is no longer regarded as a party to the felony).
The Old Testament law with regard to bestiality is set forth in the book of Leviticus (and elsewhere): Leviticus 18:23 - "Neither shalt thou lie with any beast to defile thyself therewith: neither shall any woman stand before a beast to lie down thereto: it is confusion." Leviticus 20:15-16 = "And if a man lie with a beast, he shall surely be put to death: and ye shall slay the beast." "And if a woman approach unto any beast, and lie down thereto, thou shalt kill the woman, and the beast: they shall surely be put to death: their blood shall be upon them."
One should always bear in mind, in considering the sexual prohibitions laid down by the Hebrews and the severity of the penalties for violating them, that they were based mainly on what was considered to be an urgent need to increase population, so that no sexual act was to be tolerated which was not aimed at procreation; and that the acts prohibited were quite commonplace among the people, so that there were, in fact, some legitimate grounds for regarding those acts as an at least potential threat to the achievement of the maximum population increase thought essential to survival.
Once this is understood, we will recognize that neither of these factors any longer obtains; on the other hand, we have no longer such urgent need, real or imaginary, to increase our numbers - indeed, it is birth control that is the urgent necessity; on the other hand, bestiality is certainly not by any means a commonplace practice. In other words, we do not have the problems the Israelites had, and cannot on a realistic, as distinguished from a superstitious, basis justify the severe penalties still meted out for this practice.
The law of the Hittites, which antedated the biblical law by several centuries, also prescribed the death penalty for bestiality, but with the stipulation that any offender might be pardoned by the king, as distinguished from the Old Testament sentence of death, which was officially at least unconditional. Just why the Hittites took a more benign view of bestiality with a horse or a mule than of the same offence with a cow, hog, or dog, my scholarship does not presently suffice to say. Doubtless they had their reasons, and the Hittite Code on bestiality, as cited by Kinsey, does make the distinction: "If a man lie with a cow the punishment is death." "If a man lies with a hog or a dog, he shall die." "If a bull rear upon a man, the bull shall die, but the man shall not die." "If a boar rear upon a man, there is no penalty." "If a man lies with a horse or a mule, there is no penalty, but he shall not come near the king, and he shall not become a priest."
Moving ahead to the eighth century, we perceive that the spirit of thrift is happily in evidence. That good merchant, Charlemagne, an economist of whom any Rotary Club or Chamber of Commerce might be proud, ordered that cows and she-goats involved in bestial relationships should be executed, but that their flesh should be used for dog food, while their hides should be put to use on his farms. Dubois-Desaulle remarks of this that bestiality must have been very common for Charlemagne to consider it worth his while to mention the matter in his Capitularise.
Forging on to the tenth century, we encounter a comparatively easy-going policy inaugurated under the pontificate of Pope John XII - an ascendant to the papal throne whose distinction it is that he ended his mission as God's envoy on earth under circumstances unusual even for the papacy: That is to say, he died in the very act of adultery. {7} Under John XII, persons convicted of the high crime of bestiality could evade the penalty if they would make a payment of 250 livres to the coffers of the Church. The fine, as a punishment for bestiality, had also once been the practice of the ancient Romans, though only as the result of a legislative oversight. For a time, the penalty was a fine of 10,000 sesterces (the equivalent of a one thousand dollar fine, or thereabouts, today), but the death penalty was soon to be invoked.
As suggested, the earlier leniency is not to be taken as an example of enlightened Roman tolerance for the fleshly frailties of zooerasts. Rather, careless lawmakers had negligently lumped bestiality in with pederasty under the general heading of "sodomy," and found themselves in the impossible position of being unable to execute those whose tastes ran to animals without executing those whose tastes ran to homosexuality as well, the ranks of the latter having notoriously included high-ranking Romans from the emperors on down. Needless to say, astute Roman legislators soon sealed off this legal loophole through which were slipping depraved goat-herds, debauched serving girls, and other hardened bestialists whose infamies Imperial Rome felt obliged to punish by death.
Even previous to the pontificate of Blessed John XII, periods of penance were being assigned by Catholic confessors for persons confessing to the grievous sin of bestiality. These penances were set forth in the Penitentials, half-secular, half-ecclesiastical criminal codes in use up to the thirteenth century. The Penitentials not only specify varying penalties, according not to divine revelation, but to the differing views of their respective authors, but within the same document vary the penance according to the status of the offender. Thus penance inflicted on bestialist bishops and priests were somewhat more severe than those handed out to mere laymen.
Generally, boys confessing to unholy cohabitations with beasts got off the lightest, a penance of one hundred days being stipulated by Egbert in the ninth century for this particular juvenile delinquency. Unmarried men commonly fared somewhat better than married ones; they received lighter penances because they had no wives upon whom to appease their baser appetites and were therefore more susceptible to the erotic allurements of animals.
Penances ranged in severity from the Penitentiale Pseudo - Romanum's one-year penance for married men, six months for bachelors, to a ten-year penance for bestiality ordered by the Penitentiale Hubertense. Burchards Penitential assigned to unmarried men guilty of bestiality forty days on bread and water and seven years of penance; while married men received a ten-year penance. Women having the abominable intercourse with horses drew a seven-year penance from Burchard.
In the Middle Ages, bestiality received full (some might even say excessive) attention from Catholic jurist-theologians, whose discussions of the matter would fill volumes. One thorny problem involved the relationship, if any, between sexual intercourse with animals on the one hand, and sexual intercourse with demons (incubi and succubi) on the other. This was an especially delicate and difficult theo-juristic subject for the reason that the Devil so often assumed animal form (as did his daemonic minions) for the purpose of concupiscently consorting with witches; and it was not always possible for even the most perspicacious and learned inquisitor to determine with certainty whether the animal was really an animal, or rather a demon in disguise.
One solution to a portion of this grave dilemma was to distinguish between the crimes of bestiality - iniquitous carnal intercourse with animals - and demonolatry - the most loathsome, heretical, meretricious, flagitious, and perverted sexual connection with demons. This did not, of course, enable witch-hunters to say with precision that a given goat was or was not a demon, but it did permit of a greater variety in statutes and writings dealing with the problems.
Demonology aside, Catholic theologians tended for a time to take the view that bestiality was a crime against God (it could not very logically be considered a crime against man), and that therefore the punishment was divine. This could be understood in two ways, and was. On the one hand, it might be taken to mean that punishment for bestiality should be left to God, who would handle the matter in the felon's next life if not in this one. More commonly, however, the offender was punished in this life - with the understanding that his executioners were instruments of Our Father, acting not on their own behalf, but on His.
Penalties against men and women were, in the Middle Ages, combined with penalties against the animals involved, so that sometimes human and beast were executed together. The Parliament of Paris, 1601, and the Parliament of Aix, 1679, justified the burning of beasts involved in bestiality not on scriptural grounds, but on the basis that permitting them to live would perpetuate among men the memory of the odious crimes to which the animals had been parties, albeit involuntarily. Sometimes, human and beast were tried together, by the same judicial body and under similar laws, though the question of whether the beast had a soul, or could be credited with free will, and was thus capable of behaving criminally or sinfully, remained always a matter for strenuous and intricate debate.
Animals also, on occasion, underwent torture; their yelps and howls, as they were roasted over slow fires or suspended head downward by hooks inserted in their flesh, were taken as confessions of guilt. In one case at Chartres, in 1606, a dog was tried in absentia and hanged in effigy for its participation in an act of bestiality. By the early seventeenth century, a few persons accused of bestial intercourse were being set free when the courts decided that such connections were anatomically implausible (and also, in at least one case, that while man's depravity is not to be questioned, an animal will not go against the intentions of nature).
Not so lucky was sixteen-year-old Claudine de Culam, who came to trial at Rognon, France, in 1601. In this case, the magistrate - at the urging of Claudine's mother, who was stoutly certain of the girl's innocence - agreed to put the matter to a scientific or at least pragmatic test. Claudine, who allegedly had been caught red-handed, copulating with a white, spotted dog, was taken, in the company of court-appointed female "experts," to a chamber adjacent to the courtroom. The dog was also brought into the chamber with the defendant.
"The matrons had the young girl undress completely in order to examine her, and immediately the dog, not waiting to be put to the test, jumped upon her, and went about knowing her carnally, 'which he would perhaps have accomplished had we not prevented him,' wrote the matrons in their official proceedings of the transaction." Primarily on the basis of this evidence, both the girl and the dog were strangled and their bodies burned, and their ashes "thrown to the winds," that as little trace as possible might remain to remind mankind of their monstrous misdeeds. (The case is described more fully by A. F. Niemoller, whose Bestiality and the Law is briefly quoted from above.)
Voltaire, taking as liberal a stand as he could at the time, denounced the harshness of the penalty for bestiality as it was meted out in Europe: "There is hardly a tribunal in Europe," he wrote, "which has not condemned to the fire some miserable ones convicted of this turpitude; it exists, but it is rare in Europe. The question has been much discussed whether the penalty of fire is not too barbarous today for the young peasants who along are guilty of this infamy and who scarcely differ from the animals with which they couple." (We may assume that Voltaire's choice of the word "infamy" is a concession to the times, and that he regarded bestiality as at most a misdemeanour.
It is interesting to note that within the same sentence he describes bestiality as "rare in Europe," while asserting that "there is hardly a tribunal in Europe" that has not condemned persons to death for it. This incongruity is perhaps in itself evidential of the distress he felt when contemplating the disproportion between offence and punishment.)
So far as courts-martial are concerned, it is safe to say without wading through any great mass of documents that the mechanization of modern armies has brought about a decline in the number of cases of bestiality coming before military tribunals. Before the passing of the horse cavalry, however, stories of bestial intercourse and cavalrymen caught at it were campfire gossip in the armies of all nations, and penalties ranged from on-the-spot reprimands through fines and prison terms and dishonourable discharges up to execution by firing squads.
Even with the demise of the cavalry, the disappearance of the mule from camp life, and the banishment of most all other beasts from the military establishments as well, bestiality has not vanished entirely from the juristic proceedings of the armed services. Thus, one U.S. case was being appealed as recently as 1960, and at least two others were tried in the European Theatre of Operations during World War II. In two of the cases, the defendants were charged with carnal copulations with chickens, and in the other case the animal involved was a cow.
Thus is reflected the oft-lamented decease of the cavalry as the great majority of all bestiality cases used, in the good old days, to involve mares. {8} Frederick the Great is said to have dealt with at least two such (equine, or equestrian) cases. On one occasion, it is told, he was asked to pass sentence on a cavalryman who had been caught in the act of copulating with a mare. Frederick is supposed to have responded: "The fellow is a pig, and should be transferred to the infantry." On another occasion, he is said to have dismissed entirely the charge against another member of his armies, remarking (profanely and flippantly) that soldiers are entitled to sexual freedom.
It is obvious from his comments in both cases that he regarded the offence as no more than a peccadillo. Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld (Sexual History of the World War) quotes a Hungarian military physician who told him that on the Italian front during World War I the Hungarian Hussars quite frequently copulated with their mares, and that some of the officers also engaged in this practice. According to Hirschfeld's informant, the (enlisted) offenders were not tried by courts-martial for their atrocities, but were flogged on the spot.
While U.S. legislators have shown admirable restraint where trial and punishment of animals is concerned, there have still been some quite curious courtroom proceedings in this country involving bestiality, actual or alleged. In Indiana, in 1858, for example, a slander suit was brought by Eli and Mary Ausman, man and wife, against a man going by the name of Veal. This Veal, the plaintiffs charged, had accused Mrs. Ausman of giving birth to two puppy dogs in a haystack, with the unmistakable implication that she had been guilty of grossly irregular conduct with a male canine. Veal's defence attorney held, as a keystone of his client's plea of innocence, that there could be no slander for the reason that giving birth to puppy dogs is manifestly beyond the capabilities of any human female. The court, however, in finding for the Ausmans, took due note of the limitless reaches of human credulity and ignorance, and stated that the story maliciously circulated by Veal might well, however preposterous, find its believers.
Isabel Drummond (The Sex Paradox) tells us that "In an Iowa suit a wife who saw her husband having sexual relations with a cow was granted a divorce, and an Ohio court decided that the husband's sexual relations with a beast, though not constituting adultery, did form the basis for 'extreme cruelty.' Unnatural practices of this kind, the court said, are an 'infamous indignity to the wife and would make the marriage relation so revolting to her that it would become impossible to discharge the duties of a wife and would defeat the whole purpose of the relation.' " This would seem to be one of the few instances where a U.S. court of law has recognized that the "whole purpose" of marriage is to legitimise the copulations of the marriage partners.
To these oddities let us append only the datum that certain Catholic writers have pondered the question of whether bestiality should be a legitimate ground for separation - which after much soul-searching, they decided it should. {9}
Looking now at the present state of legislation aimed at preserving us from demoralization by the route of rampant bestiality, most of the U.S. statutes dealing with animal contacts include this offence under the more general category of "sodomy," and possible penalties vary widely from state to state as is the case with sex legislation generally in this country, one state punishing harshly what is penalized only lightly in another. (The astute American sex offender, it would seem, should study the laws of the several sovereign states, and then take care to reside in one, which regards with relative levity the particular abomination to which he or she happens to be addicted.)
In order to protect society from the depredations of these (zooerastic and other) fiends, the U.S. offers punishments for sodomy, or "crimes against nature," ranging from a year's imprisonment up through life at hard labour, though a few states have a fine and/or imprisonment penalty. Some states mention, in addition to animals, the possibility of outrages committed with birds and barnyard fowls, and specify that almost any kind of contact regarded as sexual shall constitute the offence. Thus neither "penetration" nor spilling of seed, ancient yardsticks in sex offences, need be proved, in most states to have taken place.
While I have made no check of the matter, it is said that the average U.S. penalty for bestiality ranges from two to five years' imprisonment. It seems likely however that a good many offenders are permitted to go free on condition of future asceticism, or have their sentences suspended with the understanding that they will submit to the necessary psychiatric reorientation procedures.
The social penalties resulting from being brought to trial for bestiality are, of course, another matter. Where this offence is concerned, the attitude of the community towards the offender can readily be imagined, and however lenient the court may be, the mere fact that the individual's behaviour is brought to public notice is sufficient to make future life in that locality impossible for him (while of course there is always the danger, which even spectrally is tormenting, that wherever he goes his sin may one day catch up with him). It is also worth noting, as Kinsey has done, that where persons are imprisoned for bestiality they customarily face unusually harsh mistreatment at the hands of both prison authorities and their fellow convicts.
The imbecility of American sex statutes is perhaps no-where more evident to the dispassionate inquirer than in this area. In most sexual acts which are punishable, there is at least the off chance that some other person will be injured in some way by the conduct of the person engaging in the prohibited behaviour. But in the case of bestiality, no other person can possibly be injured, unless in the rare instance where domestic animals belonging to another person are used and subjected to sadistic or cruel mistreatment. And even here, in these extremely rare cases, the damage is one to property only, and the property is quite adequately protected by legislation having nothing to do with sexual behaviour. (We should perhaps grant one other exception: The possibility of cardiac arrest, little or large strokes, or other trauma that might be sustained by elderly ladies chancing to happen upon farmhands in flagrante delicto with the lap-dog or the livestock.)
But on what possible rational grounds can our society send to prison for many years, or otherwise severely punish, the individual who engages in the peccadillo of sexual relations with an animal? Moreover, given the rather substantial frequency of such behaviour, especially in rural areas where there is abundant opportunity for it, how can society justify the undeniably scapegoat prosecution and persecution of that negligible minority of individuals who come before the courts to be tried or sentenced outright on guilty pleas to this offence?
Emotionalism run amok, magical and theological superstition, Puritanism, and hysteria are invariably present, singly or in combination, in these cases, working to magnify the significance of the act and to create a psychical climate wherein few judges are able to function sanely, dispassionately, and humanely, as they ought to. Most often, the offender is some poor farmer or other rustic, cut off from the possibilities to engage in the multiple fornication enjoyed by the bulk of the male population. (I say male, because apparently only one conviction for bestiality has ever been obtained against a female in this country.
Mentioned by Kinsey, the case is State v. Tarrant 1949:80 N.E. 2d Ohio 509.) The question will arise, and it is a legitimate one: What of the rights of the animals? Should they not be protected by law from abuse at the hands of sex deviates and rural voluptuaries who would exploit them for erotic purposes? But in considering the protection of animals, the same criteria should be applied here as elsewhere - which implies that the question must be shorn of the magical-emotional aura with which sexuality tends to enshroud it. The question will then be seen to be one of whether the animal is injured, or endures pain, as the result of the bestial intercourse.
In acts of sadistic bestiality, which are primarily sadistic and only secondarily bestiality, the animal does, of course, require protection. It may be pointed out, however, that there are ample laws prohibiting cruelty to animals (ample laws, not ample enforcement), and it is these laws which should be invoked, whether the cruelty be sexually or otherwise motivated. There are, indeed, no grounds for a separate sub-species of legislation where sex-motivated cruelty to animals is concerned. Where sadism is not present, there is considerable room for doubt as to whether there is any cruelty.
It has always been noted in fact, by ancient historians and up through Kinsey in our own time, that animals tend to become affectionately attached (not only physically) to humans who have sex relations with them, and sometimes have even been known to forsake intercourse with their own kind in testimony to their preference for relations with humans. Whatever one may think of bestiality, this does not sound as if it were an act of cruelty so far as the animal is concerned.
And it is in any case ironic and suggestive of hypocrisy that those who pronounce bestiality to be an act of cruelty to the animal, and who here evince such touching concern about the animals' welfare, are in most cases not at all concerned about the use of animals for heavy labour, their unnatural confinement as household pets, their slaughter for food, their being placed on display in zoos, and most odiously of all, their being hunted down and maimed or killed by so-called sportsmen - all practices which, beyond the slightest doubt, are more painful and more inimical to the beasts' welfare than is the sexual relationship with a human, in which the animal may even find considerable pleasure.
It must therefore, if we are to be at all realistic, be concluded that any infringement on the rights or protective needs of animals is a negligible one, and that it is not here that we should seek to justify our severe punishment of the individual convicted of bestiality. I will have more to say about the role of the animal in the zooerastic and zoophilic relationships in another place.
DEVILS, WITCHES, AND OTHER WONDERS
To the reader who is not familiar with this subject of bestiality it may seem that what has gone before is both inordinately bizarre and somehow detached from the real world. However, the discussion up to the present point is likely to seem down-to-earth and a bit commonplace when compared to much of what is yet to come. For we embark now on what is more than ever a voyage into the nightmarish fantasy world of the human mind, which has concerned itself with bestiality down the centuries, and which has sometimes wandered into areas where the traditional boundaries of the objective and subjective, the conscious and the unconscious, waver, collapse, and merge into a grotesque microcosm of imagination and obsession wherein nothing is strange or improbable.
We begin by touching, only scantily, upon the vast lore of bestiality in witchcraft, demonology, magic, and occultism. That demons sometimes take the form of animals in order to consort bestially with humans was regarded, in the Middle Ages, as an indisputable and incontrovertible fact of existence. Dubois-Desaulle writes in this regard that
"there were demons who took the form of goats or sheep, and who accomplished the carnal act with the witches. The girls and women each held their demon by the hand or by the hoof. The dances and shakings were followed by scenes of debauchery. "
Francoise Secretain, who was burned alive, admitted that the devil had known her carnally four or five times, sometimes in the form of a dog, a cat, or a hen 'and that his semen was cold.' This Francoise, who called herself a witch, was perhaps simply given to bestiality and baptized the domestic animal which served to assuage her desires, a demon.
"Some women admitted that they left the Sabbath, sometimes on a goat, a bull, or a dog, sometimes on a horse, and often submitted to the assaults of the animal, who knew them carnally. There is to be read in a work on the history of France that in the year 1458 a great number of men and women were burned in the city of Arras, accused by one another. They confessed that in the night they had been transported to dances and that they had lain with the Devil, some under the human form and others under the bestial form."
While the Devil (and his demons) most often assumed the form of that traditional symbol of (sometimes evil) virility, the goat, He could appear in any animal form which happened to suit His whim of the moment, and history records instances of His having assumed the forms of a multiplicity of serpents, birds, and beasts. He could, of course, appear in human form also; moreover He could transform humans into animals, and a bestial copulation could take place, say, between a goat who was the Devil, and a she-goat who was a human thus transformed; or the Devil could assume the form of a man, say, and commit bestiality with a human in the form of a bitch, ewe, mare, or some other creature.
Notable amongst these data are instances of the Devil changing the sex of witches so that a male human might be transformed into a female animal, or a female human into a male animal, or for that matter, humans might (most wishfully of all, one assumes) be changed into their human sexual opposites - all of these being examples of sex change accomplished less painfully than are the Christine Jorgensen transformations of the present day. True enough, the price for this and other benefits conferred was one's soul; but, on the other hand, the contemporary surgeon does not always charge much less.
Sometimes the Devil also tampered with the sexuality of animals. Thus, whether it were the Devil in disguise, or a creature which had made a pact with the Devil - a matter the court left unresolved - it is on record that in 1474, at Basle, a cock was tried and condemned to death for having laid an egg; and this despite a brilliant defence by the rooster's attorney, who argued that the laying of an egg is an involuntary act, and thus his client was both morally and legally blameless. (He might also, had it then existed, have argued in terms of the M'Naghten Rule that his client neither understood that the egg-laying was wrong nor was, at the time of the crime, able to distinguish between right and wrong. In any case, it is not likely that he could have won an acquittal where so monstrous an act was involved.)
By some accounts, demons also lured animals other than humans to their destructions by representing themselves as sexually attractive creatures of the same species, opposite (rutting, if female) sex. For example, real horses were destroyed by being led into swamps and quicksand or over cliffs by demons in the form of erotically desirable mares and stallions. What the monstrous couplings of demons with the lower animals were called I do not know. Bestio-demoniality?
In goat form, the Devil appeared at the Sabbath, and at other gatherings of the faithful, and received the "kiss of infamy," or obscene osculation, on His bottom before proceeding to such matters as the defloration of virgins, and coitus, sodomy, cunnilingus, and fellatio with the remainder of the congregation. Sometimes in the form of a bird-serpent, for example, He performed coitus and pedication and had Himself fellated all at the same time - a feat achieved by virtue of his possessing a lengthy and sinuous three-pronged phallus, which He kept, when it was not in use, coiled about His waist ("like a serpent," in the words of some eye-witnesses).De Lancre, a noted demonologist, presents the typical attitude of the authorities towards these celebrations when he speaks of women (witches) "loving a violently stinking goat, caressing him amorously, becoming intimate and coupling with him horribly and impudently. . . ."
Unspeakable orgies of witches with boars had been duly noted by another, earlier, demonologist, Alphonsus de Spina, in the fifteenth century, who wrote that there were demons called Bruxae who caused old women falsely to believe they had magic powers. These victims of demonic deception, he tells us, had a meeting place, where they gathered to kiss the backside of a boar and otherwise, and even more meretriciously, to provide tangible tokens of their adoration. Presumably they laboured under the impression that this boar was their Satanic Master in porcine habiliment.
Yet another of the Devil's bestial transformations led to a popular saying still current: "The Devil has goose feet." This formerly referred to the Prince of Darkness' propensity for assuming the form of a goose in order to cloacally copulate with human males, and possibly to indulge in bestial tribadism as well, but not many moderns employing the saying may be presumed to be aware of its historic significance.
Not only devils but sometimes popes as well are said to have taken on beastly forms for zooerastic purposes. Thus, Cardinal Bermo, in his Life of Hildebrand, charges that the pope made sacrifices to demons and assumed animal forms to have intercourse with women. The ceremony of ritualistic fornications of women with goats - more nearly in emulation of the carryings-on at Mendes than those of the witches - is revived periodically by occultists and organizations of debauchees.
A recent example is said to have been the "Love is the law" cult presided over by Aleister Crowley during the period of residence at the abbey of Thelema, Corfu, Sicily. Crowley's mistress, and perhaps other female Thelemites as well, are reported to have engaged there in acts of bestiality with a sacred goat. These acts of "Sex Magick" were supposed to "generate magical currents," and to be useful in divining the future, attracting wealth, smiting one's enemies, etc. We may suppose that there was at least one other purpose - to provide entertainment for the Master Therion (Crowley), who enjoyed that sort of thing.
The most secret (and some not-so-secret) lore of occultism is replete with innumerable instances of humans copulating with animals of all sorts - materialized from their own ectoplasm, encountered whilst travelling on the (lower) astral planes, created as "thought-forms," and so on. There are a host of techniques for materializing such animals. In some cases, the explanation is doubtless that the animals are voluntarily or involuntarily auto-hypnotically hallucinated, just as human forms have been intentionally or spontaneously hallucinated and put to the same usage. Or, in less frequent instances, another person hypnotizes the subject and then provides the verbal suggestions. Following such hallucinatory intercourse it is not at all rare that the body of the human partner bears the claw and/or tooth marks of the animal, inflicted in the heat of its passion. {10}
We will take note, before leaving this curious realm, of certain other occult notions and practices related to bestiality. For example, the metamorphosis of humans into animals, generally (in occultism) called "transformation," may lead to bestiality, although the transformation was not directly for that purpose. The lycanthrope or werewolf, especially, is said, once transformed into a wolf, to sometimes run with packs of real wolves and to have sexual intercourse with them. The werewolf, assuming the form of a wolf, may also sexually and bestially attack humans.
It is well known of course that some of these lycanthropes actually believe themselves to have assumed the forms of wolves, so that in their minds at least the sexual acts they perform are in a sense bestial ones. (This would be true whether the intercourse is with an animal or with a human: The werewolf conceives of himself not as a wolf entirely, but as a human or at least part-human consciousness in a wolf's body, and this remains true even at the height of the lycanthropic frenzy, although later the werewolf, a man again, may have no memory whatever of the episode just terminated. Thus, his relation with a wolf would be that of a man-wolf with a wolf, and his relation with a human would be that of a wolf-man with a human, and in either case the relation could be said to be bestiality.)
Obviously, it would not be often, and probably never, save under artificial conditions, that such an individual would succeed in actually cohabiting with a wolf. However, he could experience the cohabitation in dreams or hallucinations which would seem to him to be altogether real. Similarly, his sexual acts with women would occur largely on a fantasy or hallucinatory level, though occasionally psychical lycanthropes do commit actual rapes, sometimes accompanied by sadistic acts, such as rending the flesh of the victims with their teeth (which are experienced as lupine).
But again, it does not much matter to the werewolf, from the standpoint of the "reality" of his experience, whether the act is performed in physical fact or even in psychological fact. And the memory of the psychical event might well differ not at all from the memory of the factual one, so that later the lycanthrope could not distinguish in his mind between what "really" happened and what was dreamed or imagined.This same confusion characterized many of the witches who believed their own testimony that they had copulated with the Devil in animal form and committed other sacrileges and crimes. {11}
In Voodoo ceremonies, and in some other religious and magical rituals of both primitive and civilized peoples, the individual believes himself transformed into a wolf, tiger, leopard, goat, or whatever, and has sexual relations either with another human similarly transformed, with another human in human form, or by prearrangement, with an actual animal of the kind he believes himself to be. In these cases, too, we are probably justified in concluding that there remains at least some awareness of the self as human, and of the act, therefore, as one of bestiality.
THERAPEUTIC BESTIALITY
The Goat-God of Mendes, according to a usually well-informed source, was not only the incarnation of the procreative deity and a pleasure partner for priests and parishioners but also had a healing role to perform. The recipients of the therapeutic ministrations of the sacred goats of the temple at Mendes were nymphomaniacs who were locked up in the temple with the trained goats and forced to remain there until the beasts became too satiate to copulate with them further; at which point, presumably, the nymphomaniacs were pronounced cured.
How successful this satyric shock therapy may have been we are lamentably not advised; but Villemont assures us that similar operations were performed in the temples of Astarte or Anaitis, and the fact that this medical technique was not confined to a single clinic may possibly be testimony to its efficacy. More commonly, bestiality was regarded as a cure for venereal diseases; so widespread has been this belief that there are few places in the world where the remedy has not been regarded as sure-fire at one time or another.
Both the Persians, who cured gonorrhoea (and leprosy) by means of bestiality therapy, and the Southern Slavs, according to Bloch, were firm believers in the effectiveness of this method of treatment. The same was true of the Tamils, who additionally believed that they could cure venereal diseases by raping young girls. The Moors believed that gonorrhoea could be cured by committing bestiality with she-asses, though only if the act were performed unfailingly on three successive days. (Young Moors, as mentioned elsewhere, also attributed to bestiality the power of making the [not yet fully developed] penis grow, and believed that it increased virility in the bargain.)
Westermarck contributed to the knowledge of this branch of medicine by informing us that in Andjra it was believed that sexual relations with a black dog would almost certainly suffice to render the zooerast immune from either arrest or imprisonment. Both medical prescriptions and ethical injunctions connected with the healing properties of human-animal intercourse are set forth in El Ktab, Omar Haleby's interpretation of the Koranic law: "Do not couple, then, O men! nor fornicate with other men or animals! . . . This told, I ought to speak of the cases where, according to many doctors, who are in conformance on this with the opinion of famous physicians, it is permitted to fornicate with animals of large size, such as the goat, mule, etc.
These cases are purely in the medical domain and can be put into practice only as a curative means in the sole interest of health. It is thus that one is permitted to fornicate with female animals when he is attacked with simple or syphilitic gonorrhoea, strong inflammations of the Dkeur (phallus), and other affections. . . . "Experience has demonstrated that, under the influence of this fornication, man unburdens himself of the virus causing his maladies, without the animal's contracting them, for this virus is immediately destroyed by the great heat residing in the animal's vulva, and by the bitter and acid qualities of the secretions of its mucous membranes.
"If, then, O men! you are sick and without medical aid, or if this latter has been powerless, you may fornicate with animals, as has been said above; but this fornication should cease, under penalty of the infraction of the law of Islam, from the time that you will have regained your health."
It has also been held, however, that bestiality is the cause of venereal diseases. Peruvians believed intercourse with alpaca to have been responsible for the origin of syphilis; while an English physician, John Lindner, held that syphilis resulted from sodomy committed with large apes (these apes being, he explained, the "satyrs" of the ancients). Van Holmont declared that venereal diseases came into being when a man had abominable relations with a mare at the Siege of Naples - the diseases being formerly of mares or horses only - and that these maladies were spread when the guilty individual subsequently had sexual relations with other humans.
While bestiality may be the cure in some cases, in others it is the complaint - a dread disease which itself cries out for the ministrations of the healer. Fortunately, such cases may be readily treated by that near-panacea for so many ills of mankind - satisfying coition with a member of the human opposite sex.
Thus in the Babylonian Gilgamesh epic, the wildman-hero, Enkidu, has sexual relations with animals, who are the only sexual partners he knows. Later, however, he encounters a sacred prostitute, who seduces him, provides him with greater satisfactions, and thus induces him to forsake forever his zooerastic practices. {12} The prostitute, a representative of the cult of Ishtar, accomplishes her cure in the short space of one week - though it should be added that the therapy is unusually intensive. {13}
Along these lines, the anthropologist Raphael Patai interestingly remarks that: "In exactly the same sense does Rabbi Eleazar, a Talmudic sage, interpret the Biblical story of the creation of Eve. After God had created Adam, we read in the book of Genesis, He said, 'It is not good that man should be alone: I will make him a helpmeet for him.' Thereupon God formed out of the ground 'every beast of the field and every fowl of the air, and brought them unto the man to see what he would call them . . .' Evidently the ancient Hebrew narrator presupposes here that one of the animals could have proved satisfactory for Adam to become his helpmeet. However, among all the animals 'for Adam there was not found a helpmeet for him.' The first series of experiments proved unsuccessful. Thereupon God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam and of one of his ribs made a woman and presented her to Adam.
'This time,' Adam immediately exclaimed, 'this is the bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh . . .' (Gen 2:23). It is to this last verse that Rabbi Eleazar appends his comment: 'This teaches us,' he says, 'that Adam had intercourse with all the animals and all the beasts, but he was satisfied only when he had intercourse with Eve.' " Thus, as with Enkidu, it is the woman who proves the more satisfying sexually, and who thus leads the man away from intercourse with animals, which was originally engaged in because the man knew no other sex partners.
However, we note that the same claim is sometimes made in reverse, with persons experienced in sexual intercourse only with other humans turning to bestiality as a preferred and more satisfying means of erotic gratification once they have experienced it. For example, two cases are cited elsewhere in this volume (see "Norman mailer and the Myth of Negro Sexuality") where women declare that "when a woman has tasted a dog, she will never want a man again." The cynic might suggest here that the essence of the matter - whether in the cases of Enkidu and Adam on the one hand, or of the women just referred to on the other - is simply a desire for some variety.
By way of conclusion, it may be said that bestiality therapy, although presumably less than efficacious, is still a practice to be preferred over the one current in the Middle Ages when it was believed that gonorrhoea could be cured by intercourse with a virgin, and not a few syphilitic and/or gonorrhoeaic rapists desperately sought relief from their ravaging afflictions by having the prescription filled and refilled.
MONSTROUS ISSUES
If the folklore of therapeutic bestiality is widespread, that of monstrous births resulting from human-animal sex relationships is omnipresent. The old myths include tales of such births, they have been reported as matters of historic fact by writers of all times and places, and there are not a few persons who still today believe such hybridisations possible (including Russian scientists, who as recently as the 1930's were reported deep in the wilds of Turkestan, there ardently endeavouring to cross-breed men with chimpanzees in order to establish once and for all the authority of evolutionary doctrine).
Together, all of this lore constitutes a formidable mass of superstition and misconception surrounding the possibility that animals may be able to fertilize humans - or that humans may be able to fertilize animals - with resulting pregnancies and curious creatures issuing forth from the respective maternal wombs. While such tales have, for obvious "reasons," great apes and gorillas for their most frequent animal heroes and heroines, there are probably a few beasts which someone has not suggested at some time or another to have impregnated or become pregnant by a human sex partner. A call of the roll would not find rats, rabbits, and pachyderms omitted.
Old-time skeptics used to argue against the possibility or likelihood of hybrid beings resulting from bestial intercourse on that ground that, if such a thing could occur, the world would long since have become a "chaos of monstrosities" - an argument which carries the implication that bestiality was not altogether uncommon in those periods when the objection was put forward. Later authors, better grounded in the discoveries of materialistic science, have noted, however, that this reasoning overlooks the important fact that hybrids are always infertile, so that the total population of monsters on hand at any given time would be only the relatively few born of actual recent bestial relationships. Thas is, the monsters themselves would be unable to reproduce their own kind, and their race could not thus be multiplied to produce a "chaos of monstrosities."
Nonetheless, Greek and Roman mythology offered its own chaos of monstrosities, some of which - Minotaurs, satyrs, centaurs, and so on - we have already mentioned. Not always, however, were the offspring of bestial intercourse monstrous for the mythologists. Thus, as a result of her sexual union with a swan (Jupiter), Leda, wife of Tyndareus, king of Sparta, gave birth to Pollux and Helena; at the same time, according to the myth, but as the result of her marital relations with her husband, she gave birth, litter-like, to Castor and Clymnestra.
Clement of Alexandria, not to be thought duped or deluded in this matter, denied that Centaurs were the result of bestial intercourse betwixt men and horses. Plutarch, however, declared that he knew personally of a child begat by profligate intercourse with a mare, and of yet another resulting from bestial relations with a she-ass.
It was well known of old that in the temple of Aesculpaius women employed snakes for carnal enjoyment - a dissolute practice discovered to afford such keen erotic ecstasies that Roman women took snakes into their homes, where they would be available at all times, and not just on occasions of worship. It was established beyond possibility of reasonable doubt, much-revered authorities assure us, that Roman matrons conceived as a result of these impure serpentine amours, and it was held with almost equal certainty that their incontinent copulations with asses and canines also sometimes bore fruit.
In the fifteenth century B.C. Ugaritic mythology had already proclaimed that the god Baal once copulated with a heifer, and as a result of this divinely bestial coition a child called Mes or Mos was born. To Saxo, we are beholden for the information that a king of the Goths was born {14} as the result of the coupling of a virgin with a bear, and Richard Burton, who must be considered a leading scholar of our subject, has confirmed that sexual intercourse at least, between bears and human females, is an accomplished fact.
The immortal Saint Jerome, not one to rely on mere hearsay, affirmed that he had seen with his own eyes satyrs born in the desert as the result of the lascivious unions of girls and apes. (Most authorities hold, however, to the more conservative view that satyrs are the result of the intercourse of men with she-goats and of women with he-goats. Distinguished theologians have added the observation that satyrs must indeed be post-Great Flood hybrids, since there is no record of any having been taken aboard the ark by Noah.)
Saint Jerome receives at least some backing from Portuguese history, which records that a woman of Lisbon once gave birth to two children as a consequence of her unchaste submission to the erotic embraces of an ape. Whether these children were satyrs, we are not, however, informed. Dubois-Desaulle noted numerous instances of alleged monstrosities born of the corrupt commerce of human females with animals. He cites the prominent inquisitor Martin Del Rio, who said that women have "been seen to give birth to a dormouse, another to a savage rat, and another to a monster resembling a bear.
Torquemada thinks that these are punishments God sends to women who give themselves to disordered and abominable couplings." "Among other examples: Alcipe gave birth to an elephant. In Switzerland, in 1278, a woman was delivered of a lion. In 1471, at Pavia, a woman gave birth to a dog. Finally, in 1531, another woman gave birth, from the same womb: first to a male head enveloped in a film; secondly, to a serpent with two feet; thirdly to a whole pig." In the latter instance, one shudders to contemplate the perverse and promiscuous practices which must have preceded so peculiar a parturition. However, some of these cases, and especially the last one, may well have had some basis in fact - though, of course, the facts would have had nothing in common with the folklorish interpretations popularly laid upon the matter.
But monstrosities were born to women (as a result of merely human insemination) may indeed have curious forms, and the "head enveloped in a film," particularly, imparts a ring of basic authenticity to the story (as any competent teratologist, or informed layman, will at once recognize).
In the seventeenth century, Francesco-Maria, Guazzo, a friar and well-known author ( Compendium Maleficurum), and an eminent prosecutor and burner of witches as well, reported a case of issue resulting from the copulation of a man with a cow. A lewd fellow in Belgium, said Guazzo, had to do with a cow, which soon became pregnant and after a time gave birth to a foetus which was not a calf but a male human child. A number of persons were present when this less-than-blessed event took place, and they actually saw the baby issue from the cow's womb, whereon they retrieved it from the ground where it was lying and turned it over to a nurse. This human child lived, grew up, was baptized and instructed in the Christian life, and devoted himself to pious contemplation and penance for the evil deed wrought by his paternal progenitor.
But despite all of these evidences of full-blown humanity, he discerned in himself certain cow-like tendencies, such as an unseemly and insatiate appetite for grass, and a recurring desire to chew his cud, which was repressed with the uttermost difficulty.
The learned Guazzo had no doubt that the father of this youth was a man, but he doubted that the mother was a cow. Seeking a "more rational" explanation, he came up with the theory that the Devil, aware of the father's bestial behaviour, caused the cow to appear pregnant, and then when the cow fell into false labour pains, which He had also caused, the Devil, unnoticed, placed a child He had obtained elsewhere in the vicinity of the cow's womb, so that those present would think the cow had given birth to it. After that, speculated Guazzo, the Devil let the wind out of the cow so that she could return to her normal size and compete the deception.
Though Frater Guazzo does not say so, we must, apparently, regard the lad's bovine propensities as strictly psychogenic phenomena, evidential of neurosis rather than of any maternal hereditary influences. The story is interesting in that it relates one of the relatively few allegedly factual instances where the monstrous issue is said to have been a normal human in appearance and to have survived into adulthood.
Medical belief in the possibility of fruitful unions between beasts and humans extended in many cases well up into modern times, and medical interest in the problem of human monsters remains, of course, intense at the present time. While it was rather widely known in the nineteenth century and even earlier that bestial connections are inevitably sterile, there was nonetheless a considerable resistance to the acceptance of this knowledge - based in part, no doubt, on reverence for the teachings of classical theologians, and in part on a reluctance to declare impossible and perhaps fraudulent so many historic cases apparently so extensively and authoritatively documented.
This reluctance has not been altogether abandoned even today. A more or less representative selection of historic cases, some of them originally reported by persons of considerable eminence, is offered by Gould and Pyle, in the still fascinating and instructive volume, Anomolies and Curiosities of Medicine "According to (Ambroise) Pare there was born in 1493, as the result of illicit intercourse between a woman and a dog, a creature resembling in its upper extremities its mother, while its lower extremities were the exact counterpart of its canine father . . . Lycosthenes says that in the hear 1110, in the Bourg of Liege, there was found a creature with the head, visage, hands, and feet of a man, the rest of the body like that of a pig. Pare quotes this case and gives an illustration.
Rhodiginus mentions a shepherd of Cybare by the name of Cratain, who had connections with a female goat and impregnated her, so that she brought forth a beast with a head resembling that of the father, but with the lower extremities of a goat. He says that the likeness to the father was so marked that the head-goat of the herd recognized it, and accordingly slew the goatherd who had sinned so unnaturally. "
In the Year 1547 at Cracovia, a very strange monster was born, which lived three days. It had a head shaped like that of a man; a nose long and hooked like an elephant's trunk; the hands and feet looking like the webfoot of a goose; and a tail with a hook on it. It was supposed to be a male, and was looked upon as the result of sodomy. Rueff says that the procreation of human beings and beast is brought about [1] by the natural appetite; [2] by the provocation of nature by delight; [3] by the attractive virtue of the matrix, which in beasts and women is alike.
"Plutarch, in his 'Lesser Parallels,' says that Aristonymus Ephesius, son of Demostratus, being tired of women, had carnal knowledge with an ass, which in the process of time brought forth a very beautiful child, who became the maid Onoscelin. He also speaks of the origin of the maiden Hippona, or as he calls her, Hippo, as being from the connection of a man with a mare. Aristotle mentions this in his paradoxes, and we know that the patron of horses was Hippona. . . . "
Writing in 1557, Lycosthenes reports the mythical birth of a serpent by a woman. It is quite possible that some known and classified type of monstrosity was indicated here in vague terms.
In 1726 Mary Toft, of Godalming, in Surrey, England, achieved considerable notoriety throughout Surrey, and even all over England, by her extensively circulated statements that she bore rabbits. Even at so late a date as this the credulity of the people was so great that many persons believed in her. The woman was closely watched, and being detected in her manoeuvres confessed her fraud. To show the extent of discussion this case called forth, there are no less than nine pamphlets and books in the Surgeon-General's library at Washington devoted exclusively to this case of pretended rabbit-breeding.
Hamilton in 1848, and Hard in 1884, both report the births in this country of foetal monstrosities with heads which showed marked resemblance to those of dogs. Doubtless many of the supposed results of bestiality, if seen today, could be readily classified among some of our known forms of monsters. Modern investigation has shown us the sterile results of connection between man and beast or between beasts of different species, and we can only wonder at the simple credulity and the imaginative minds of our ancestors. . . ."
Primitive peoples have their own abundant lore of monstrous issues, but I will here cite only one instance: Indians of the Amazon River country believe that tailed men among the Uginas are the result of the intercourse of women and apes. (Apes again! Intercourse with almost every variety of monkey and ape has been reported in one place or another. The mandrill is said to be especially attracted to human females, while the same is said of the gorilla. It is certain that monkeys and apes caged in zoos have made sexual advances to women and, less often, to men. Such events have been witnessed frequently, and by reliable observers, wherever zoos are maintained; and it is claimed that there is an aberrant variety of human female who obtains sexual gratification from witnessing and being the object of such advances, and who is consequently a conspicuous regular visitor at zoos.)
Gould and Pyle, marvelling in the late nineteenth century at the "simple credulity and imaginative minds of our ancestors," sang a premature dirge for the belief in the productivity of bestial unions. Vance Randolph, a contemporary author, has written (The Ozarks) that "Sexual acts between human beings and animals are rather common in the Ozarks, and nearly every native believes that these unions are sometimes fruitful. Women giving birth to litters of puppies, mares bringing forth colts with human heads, and a great variety of similar phenomena are related and very generally believed. I have never been able to locate a hillman who has actually seen any of these monstrosities - 'the' folks aluus puts 'em out o' the' way,' as one old man told me."
(I will comment on this observation of Vance Randolph's - being myself a resident of the Ozarks - by noting that, at least presently, belief in the procreative potential of human-animal sex relations does not seem to be quite so general as he suggests. However, there are still sufficient numbers of believers to render unduly optimistic the Gould and Pyle song for this particular shred of superstition.)
And if the natives of the Ozark hill country had totally abandoned the faith for a cynically scientific negativism, there would still be the Russians. As recently as 1932, the American Association for the Advancement of Science was advised that a team of Russian scientists, headed by Dr. Elie Ivanoff of Moscow, was at work on this problem and hopeful of coming up with a man-ape hybrid. The Russian scientists were expecting eventually to be able to display to their colleagues and the world "a complete chain of specimens from the perfect man back to the perfect anthropoid." This Soviet team was conducting its experiments in "the wilds of Turkestan," and at last word in 1932 was anticipating success in the imminent future.
I have seen no further reference to their activities (which are mentioned a bit more fully in the notes to Dubois-Desaulle's Bestiality). A Dr. H. S. England, who informed the Association of the work of the Russian team, said also that for a quarter of a century he had been hopeful that some Western institution of good repute would attempt similar experimentation. Dr. England further mentioned that a Berlin biologist, Dr. Herman Klaatsch, was attempting, in the early part of this century, to produce gorilla-native African hybrids, who were to be used for heavy labour. His work was interrupted by the start of World War 1, and apparently was not resumed. At the risk of disillusioning some readers, I will conclude this discussion by adding that the Russians were pursuing their ape-man by means of artificial insemination of the apes.
OF LOVE AND LUST
Is it possible for a human being to be in love, in the romantic sense of that expression, with an animal? Is it possible for an animal, within the limitations of its nature, to reciprocate such affection? These are questions which have interested philosophers, authors, artists, intellectuals, and even scientists, over the centuries. Theorists have long made a distinction between two quite different psychological states to be supposedly encountered among practitioners of bestiality. In this area the attitudes and emotions with which the (human) subjects approach their (animal) objects are considered decisive.
In what has been called "zoophilia," there is said to be a genuine feeling for the animal on the part of the human, and in exceptional cases it may approximate what is called "erotic love" when humans only are involved. Sometimes the term zoophilia is extended to embrace morbid or exaggerated emotional attachments to animals where no sexual intercourse occurs and sexual desires are not consciously present. In any case, zoophilia is an unusual, aberrant psychological condition, likely if not certain to interfere with the normal heterosexual expression and fulfilment of the normal sexual instincts.
On the other hand, the word "zooerasty" (which is also narrowly used to denote anal intercourse with a beast) has sometimes been employed to designate the sexual use of animals where no such emotional involvements exist. Zooerasty, in terms of this definition, is in fact quite akin to masturbation, and the sexual organs of the animal do not differ much, so far as the practitioner of zooerasty is concerned, from an artificial phallus, verge or facinum; or from an artificial vagina or vagina-substitute, where males are concerned. The emphasis is primarily upon the individual's erotic gratification and the elimination of sexual tensions, and upon the constellation of pleasure sensations as a whole.
The analogy to masturbation may be qualified with the observation that zooerasty is perhaps to be understood as masturbation of a somewhat higher and more complex order, since it does involve a concrete object, or Other, in the act of fulfilment. But even so, from the psychological point of view there is little in zooerasty that is morbid or seriously aberrant, especially when, as is usually the case, the act is regarded as a substitute for intercourse with a human sex-object who, for one reason or another, is not available. (It should be understood, of course, that there may be some overlapping between zooerasty and zoophilia, the words referring to the dominant as distinguished from an exclusive psychological aspect of the relationship.)
By far the greater majority of those who engage in bestiality are, as is probably obvious to everyone, zooerasts. True zoophiles are encountered with comparative rarity, and their condition is, of course, one calling for psychiatric (or, better, psychoanalytic) intervention - unless they are happy with it, and otherwise well-adjusted, in which case it would be better if society rose to the challenge posed by nature's wealth of variations from the norm and just let them alone, not attempting to interfere with an equilibrium which can in no way result in injury to anyone else.
Zooerasts, too, need be of no concern to society, since they do not involve others in their behaviour,; neither should they, commonly, be regarded as medical problems, since in most cases they are no more ill than any other masturbator, and will switch to a human sex partner whenever an appropriate one becomes available to them.
Though comparatively quite rare, as mentioned, there do occur cases of true zoophilia - of human beings who genuinely "fall in love" with animals, a love which includes sexual relations, but also such "romantic" elements as tenderness, spiritual affection, and even jealousy. While living in Europe in the late 1940's, I was reliably informed of an East German ex-nobleman who suffered from this malady.
He was in love with a (Harlequin) Great Dane bitch, and maintained a pack of these dogs to keep her company - or did, until he apprehended her copulating, as he felt, adulterously, with a male Dane, whereupon in his jealous rage he slew not just the animal that had cuckolded him but the entire pack (excepting, of course, his beloved though unfaithful mistress).
This gentleman is said to have run at night sometimes with his dogs, travelling on all fours, and to have joined them in such canine activities as chasing rabbits and howling at the moon. Being a man of considerable wealth, and the owner of an estate which provided him with sufficient privacy and seclusion, he was able to indulge this curious passion until his death (which, probably fortunately, occurred near the end of World War II, and before the Soviets had a chance to dispossess him).
The dismissal of his servants, after his strange affection for the bitch had already been noted by them, naturally led to a great deal of gossip and scandal, which eventually escaped the bounds of the state and reached Berlin where, of course, the tale was received with an inordinate delight, and even Hitler is said to have been amused by it. However, though much talked about, the zoophile was not interfered with, a few persons who covertly spied on him from positions of concealment in clumps of bushes and behind trees excepted.
Apart from his bestial perversity, the nobleman gave the appearance of being altogether normal in every respect. Old acquaintances and friends who called on him, expecting to find him raving mad and raveningly lecherous, went away disappointed and often somewhat skeptical as to the truth of the stories circulating about him. Tradesmen and a few other persons with whom he had dealings noticed nothing unusually or eccentric in his behaviour. The physician who attended him on occasion found him absolutely lucid and rational; and when this same physician performed an autopsy on the body after the nobleman's death, he found "no signs of unusual degeneration" of any sort. (What he expected to find in the way of such signs I cannot say.)
There is said to be still in existence a journal left to his heirs by this zoophilic gentleman, but no one has thus far been able to persuade them to release it for publication or even for brief perusal. It is alleged, however, to be of high literary quality, the prose somewhat reminiscent of Rilke's in (Malte Laurentes Brigge), and to describe in a wealth of psychological and other detail the author's "all-consuming love and passion" for his sub-human paramour.
We are told, though mayhap the story is to be taken cum grano salis, that upon the zoophile's death the Great Dane bitch languished at his graveside, refused all food, and soon perished. Then as stipulated in her owner's last will and testament, she was buried in a grave alongside his own. (It would seem that lacking here are only twin rose bushes, arising from each of the two graves and reaching out to intertwine eternally.
On the other hand, there are many authenticated cases of dogs pining away in grief at the death of a beloved, though not necessarily zoophilous, master or mistress.) {15} That cases of the sort of the one just summarized are so rare is probably much more surprising than that there should be such cases at all. One would expect to find, at least in the literature of bestiality which is fairly voluminous, quite a number of tales, both authentic and fictional, of human-animal "love affairs." It is not, after all, so incomprehensible that a lonely, unloved, perhaps unlovable, individual should lavish upon an animal the emotions and affections which press for expression and which can find no human outlet. Yet the instances of such relationships cited in the literature are extremely few, quite isolated in time and space, and together make up no more than a scant handful, with most of these merely anecdotal. {16}
On a more strictly sexual and animalistic plane are the tales one often hears, usually from travellers who in turn have heard them elsewhere, of native women in the jungles of Africa and other remote places who prefer the embraces of monkeys, apes, and sometimes small horses, to those of men, and who are referred to by other natives as the "brides" or "wives" of these animals. It may be that most or even all of such stories are without foundation in fact, but a great many travellers have related them, and tales of encountering human females living in the company of bands of roving apes have been fairly often recounted by persons who claim to have seen the women and their simian or anthropoid consorts with their own eyes.
The counterpart of the phenomenon of human erotic love for animals - the passionate devotion of animals to humans with whom they have been united sexually - receives more frequent mention in the lore and literature of bestiality (perhaps on the basis that animal desire for humans is at least, in a sense, an aspiration to unite with a higher form of life, while zoophilia, on the other hand, is a spiritual descent for and degradation of the human partner).
However that may be, there are quite a few stories, myths, and purported case studies of animals imbued with erotic passions for human lovers, and these are to be found not only in the writings of the antique historians and medieval theologians, where we might expect to find them, but in the works of some reputable modern authors and scientists.
Kinsey, for example, along with other scientists who have traversed this still largely untrodden field, accepts as factual that animals may develop great fondness for humans who have sexual relations with them. Some of these animals, it is said, become exclusive devotees of the bestial relationship, evidencing no further interest in sexual intercourse with their own kind. Kinsey mentions only male dogs that have been masturbated, but similar results have traditionally been described where the intercourse has taken the form of coitus, sodomy, and other practices with a variety of creatures.
Although bestiality (like, on occasion, miscegenation, and no less fallaciously) has been damned on the grounds that it is contrary to nature - the alleged evidence for this being that animals other than (depraved) man do not seek out sexual intercourse apart from their own kind - there is a vast amount of data to prove that this assertion is erroneous. The demonstrable affection conceived by animals for their human sex partners is a further blow to this doctrine unless one argues that the animals have been corrupted and led into unnatural and previously repugnant or unattractive practices which they have come pervertedly to prefer.
Apes and monkeys, as already mentioned, will solicit the sexual attentions of humans, and this without any known previous experience along such lines. Nor are their advances confined only to humans, since monkeys have been observed to attempt to copulate with such diverse creatures as serpents and skunks. Birds, too, will attempt to mate with members of other species, and generally the phenomenon of attempted cross-breeding is not at all as uncommon in the animal world as was once supposed.
Thus, as with homosexuality and other varieties of deviant behaviour branded "unnatural" by human legislators, we find that in nature - whence our notion of the "natural" is presumably derived - the activity is almost commonplace. The ready enthusiasm with which goats and baboons have historically taken to their erotic assignments has been mentioned. We are told, too, of ancient times, that pederastic priests of Baal were wont to sell the services of dogs trained for shameful ends, and that these sodomist-ecclesiastics stood in the entrances of the temples to inquire of every worshiper whether he or she had need for the dog-service.
Creatures of mythology, born according to some authorities as the results of profligate dalliance of humans with beasts, were notoriously lecherous of human females, and the satyr became renowned in this respect that the medical term "satyriasis" - insatiable male sex desire with persistent erection - still keeps his memory fresh amongst us today. Centaurs also were much enamoured of women, and according to Apollodorus, the centaur Nessus once attempted to ravish Deianira, the wife of Hercules. Hercules foiled the onslaught and slew the would-be rapist, but the dying centaur gave Deinira a recipe for a love potion, and when she had concocted it and given it to her husband, it proved a lethal poison. Thereupon, stricken by grief and remorse, she killed herself, and the revenge of the frustrated centaur was complete.
Pasiphae, lustful of the bull but unable to enlist his co-operation save by guile and duplicity, had constructed a hollow cow of brass (or, as some say, of wood) inside of which she was able to arrange herself in such a manner that her vagina was in position to accept the penetration of the bull. The deception was completed by procuring the urine of a heifer in heat and with it anointing the brass cow's vaginal orifice - after which the union was successfully consummated with not unfruitful consequence. (The reasonably erudite reader will recall that De Sade describes a torture in which a hollow elephant with a woman inside is used in this way, though with painful as distinguished from ecstatic effect.)
A well-known Eskimo legend, the meaning of which has always seemed to me obscure, is concerned with the love affair of a young girl and a whale. The girl's brothers attempt to separate her from her lover by spiriting her away in a magic boat, but she manages to leave behind them on the water a trail of objects the whale is able to follow, and at length, spurred on by the whale-like vastness of his ardour, he overtakes the boat and retrieves his human mistress.
Montaigne, to continue on the gargantuan stratum, tells us that Aristophanes once had as his rival for the affections of a young woman, an elephant. This impassioned pachyderm, when walking in the fruit market at Alexandria, would steal fruit from the stalls and carry it to the one of whom he was enamoured. Moreover, he followed the young woman about like any jealous lover and would "put his truncke into her bosome, and feele her breasts." I am obliged to confess ignorance both of the outcome of this uncommon rivalry, and as to whether the elephant ever managed to attain to further intimacies with the object of his affections.
Lastly, we should consider the case of what is undoubtedly one of history's most notorious canines. He is the dog who claimed the attention of Europe's leading demonologists and theologians by habitually lifting the habits of the holy sisters at the nunnery in the diocese of Cologne, after which he would force them to the ground, lick their inviolable secret parts, and then fall upon them with a lust which always proved irresistible. The ranks of the demonologists and inquisitors were split asunder by this enterprising beast, some holding that he was a demon, perhaps even the Devil Himself, in the dog's form, others that "it was no demon but a righteous dog." This latter point of view was vociferously and vigorously expressed by the great Bodin, who added that he was aware of the case of a woman in Toulouse who cohabited freely with her dog, according to common gossip, and sometimes shamelessly submitted to its embraces even when in public.
The question of whether bestial relations are physically painful to the animal has already been discussed, and need to be touched upon only casually here. It is desirable to investigate more thoroughly, however, the question of the psychological and emotional effects of such intercourse upon animals. The psycho physiological responses of the animal to sexual contacts with humans are largely, though it would not do to say entirely, dependent upon the methods of approach and consummation, both physical and psychological employed by the human party to the sexual act. Thus, most obviously, the human may largely preclude the possibility of physical suffering on the part of the beast by taking commonsense precautions against inflicting such suffering.
Generally speaking, it is only through sadism or brutal negligence that the animal is made to suffer in these contacts. It is evident also that a gentle manner will suffice to alleviate much of the psychological discomfort - anxiety, terror, panic, etc. - which the animal might otherwise experience in a situation both strange and sometimes seemingly menacing. It is well known that most or many animals appear to respond in kind to the mental states of humans with whom they come in contact. Anxiety and tranquillity are engendered in the beast by way of the human, particularly so once the animal and man are familiar to one another and elementary rapport has been established.
Even very large and sometimes ferocious animals - the gorilla and the lion, for example - have often been noted to be psychically susceptible to the mental and emotional states of humans. In unaccustomed, close physical contact with men and women, particularly where, as is often the case in bestiality, the human is in a state of unusual excitation, this excitation and contact, especially if the latter consists of partly restraint of the animal, are likely to generate in the animal feelings of anxiety which in some cases may reach the proportions of terror and even panic.
On the other hand, it is reported in some cases that sexual excitation and desire for physical contact are responded to in kind. In yet other instances, doubtless the great majority, the psychical and emotional states of the animal are not spectacular and probably blend elements of both anxiety and erotic arousal. It is particularly worth noting that the animal's response is far more likely to be an erotic one if, as is the case with human females, it has been subjected to a lengthy period of caresses and what may be called "love play," leading through fondling to the masturbation of the animal and, in some instances, the repeated apposition of the genitalia of the animal to the part of the body of the human with which contact is to be had.
The bestialist no less than the human lover must, in other words, and bizarre as it may sound, "woo" the chosen sex-object, in order to allay anxieties, and in order to bring that object to a pitch of erotic arousal similar to his own (animals responding to rape even less satisfactorily, and often with more vigorous resistance, I am told,{17} than women). Where this (arousal process) has been artfully managed and fully accomplished there is not, of course, any longer a question of psychical suffering on the part of the beast. It is further reported by initiates that animals, again like women, respond to competent erotic training, by becoming conditioned eventually to an increasingly swift response to the needs of the sex partner, so that "love play" need not be so prolonged as when the animal was still a novice to the zoophilic relationship.
Perhaps the best evidence that an animal need not suffer either physically or psychologically as the result of human-animal sex contacts is the already discussed observation that animals often tend to become very devoted to the humans with whom they have such contacts, and thereafter may shun intercourse with their own species. While this is, of course, speculation, it seems necessary to assume (on the basis of eliminated alternatives) that the greater pleasure derived by the animal - and it must be greater to induce the animal to forsake sexual relations with its own kind - is largely the product of the psychical and emotional climate of bestiality, to which the beast responds pleasurably.
That is to say, it is not at all likely that the superiority of the experience for the animal resides solely or even mainly in the physical aspects of the coition, which may be surely more satisfactorily enjoyed on a purely biological plane with another animal of its own species and opposite sex. Rather, one seems forced to conclude, the animal derives a considerable psychical and/or emotional pleasure from sexual contact with a being of a higher nervous, emotional, and intellectual organization, who is somehow able to provide the animal with non-material rewards which another animal is not able to offer.
We are speaking, of course, probably in the great majority of instances, of male animals, which either perform coitus with women, commit sodomy on members of either sex, or which are masturbated (or occasionally fellated) by either men or women. It is these male animals which, by almost all reports, become especially attached to their human lovers, and which may consequently abandon other methods of sexual expression. There are few and perhaps no authentic cases of a female animal that has thus behaved - even our eccentric German nobleman's Great Dane was unfaithful to him, - nicht wahr ? - and there is very little evidence that a female animal can be aroused to any degree of sexual excitation by a human.
This has to do largely with the phenomenon of rut or heat characteristic of the female animal, which generally cannot be sexually aroused when out of heat by stimuli of either a physical or psychological variety; and is explained also by the almost unbridgeable gap of the disparity between the sexual organs of the human male and the respective sexual organs of the various female animals with which men commonly attempt to have sexual congress. (Of course, no animal, male or female, can be stimulated to arousal by a human - masturbation apart - until experience has conditioned it thus to respond; but this is not too infrequently true of humans, especially females, also.)
In any case, it is the male animal, most frequently the dog, but sometimes also the monkey, ape, goat, and others, which comes to desire and even prefer erotic intercourse with humans, and which has been observed to make obvious sexual advances to humans - something only monkeys and apes have ever been reliably reported to do among female animals.
MYTHS, LITERATURE, AND ART
"One constant rule of mythology," writes Robert Graves (Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology), "is that whatever happens among the gods above reflects events on earth." It is similarly obviously true that whatever happens in the "unreal" worlds of literature and art reflects physical and psychical events in the "real" world of human desires, frustrations, and fulfilments. Among the ancients, bestiality, as practiced or fantasised about on earth, was reflected in the behaviour of the gods, who transformed themselves or their mortal love-objects or both into animals, then engaging in sexual acts.
In more recent times, fiction and folklore have provided most of the imaginary accounts of bestial intercourse, again reflecting the "real world" cravings and behaviour of mankind. It is, of course, true that in mythology, fiction and folklore have provided most of the imaginary accounts of bestial intercourse, again reflecting the "real world" cravings and behaviour of mankind. It is, of course, true, that in mythology, folklore and fiction, and perhaps especially in fairy tales, the love relations of humans with beasts are usually not just that. There are allegorical depths to be fathomed, and magical, theological, and other supernatural aspects to be considered.
The animals, especially in myth and fairy tale, are seldom ever really animals, but rather gods or men in animal forms, which have been assumed by them purposefully, or which have been forced upon them by means of magical spells, enchantments, and other divine, diabolic, or occult interventions; moreover, these forms may themselves be symbols beyond the symbolism already inherent in the gods. Nonetheless, and whatever the symbolic or allegoric significance of the narrative, there remains in any story of love or sexual relations between a human on the one hand and a beast on the other, the aspect, primary or secondary, of bestiality.
And the bestiality aspect comes increasingly to the fore as the myth or allegory is withdrawn in time from the people whose conscious and unconscious concerns it represented. For example, the copulations of Leda with the swan, Europa with the bull, and Dia with the stallion, exist today largely, in perhaps the majority of minds cognizant of the stories, on the level of eroticism. Many do not known that in each case the animal was Zeus in bestial form. Many others, who are aware of this, are little concerned with the mythic elements of what has become an imagination stimulating pseudo-historic event: The coition of the woman with the beast. But even in ancient Greece, and in the Greek-dominated mythology of the Romans, and in the mythologies of other nations and peoples as well, the bestiality aspect of the myth cannot have been totally overshadowed even contemporaneously by other more symbolic meanings.
Robert Graves is correct with admirable simplicity: The doings of the gods reflect the desires and actions of mortal men and women. It seems especially clear that where one encounters animal-human sex relations in myth and literature most copiously, bestiality itself will be most widely practiced and thought about. (This observation is confined to civilized peoples.) Moreover, and it is an important point, the popular concern with human-animal sex contacts, as reflected in myth and literature and in supposedly factual reports of actual behaviour, is customarily found to be greatest precisely among those peoples who, at the time when the literature is most abundant, are least repressed and inhibited sexually. This is especially so where the so-called perversions and other exotic forms or methods of erotic union are sought after - for example, the Greeks and Romans of Antiquity, the Europeans (peasants and lower classes) of the period of the witchcraft persecutions, the Arabs and Turks well up into modern times, and the French and English of the eighteenth century.
If this is true, and if it is also true that myths and dreams - as is often maintained - arise or erupt from a common or similar source in the human unconscious, then we would seem to have raised a significant objection or at least qualification to the view that wild animals and other animals noted for their sexual vigour and generally "free" expression of their erotic urges, are likely to represent in dreams wild, animalistic, or passionate impulses of which the dreamer is afraid, and which are presumably exclusive of bestiality desires - and that, more generally, wild animals, along with the "sexy" animals such as goats, bulls stallions, etc., may be taken to refer in dreams to libido.
Freud, whose view (in general) this is, has also noted that various animals may function in dreams as genital symbols: "Many of the beasts which are used as genital symbols in mythology and folklore," Freud wrote in his Interpretation of Dreams "play the same part in dreams: e.g., fishes, snails, cat, mice (on account of the pubic hair), and above all those most important symbols of the male organ - snakes. . . ." None of this is to suggest that wild and other sexually active animals do not sometimes represent anxiety-provoking passions or lusts in dreams (and myths); or to deny that animals may function in myth, folklore, and dream as genital symbols. It is to suggest, however, that these functions are far from being exclusive or even necessarily paramount ones.
And we may comment additionally that much less than an adequate amount of attention has been paid to animals in dream, myth, folklore, literature, art, etc., as reflecting interest in or concern with the phenomenon of bestiality itself, though it seems strikingly apparent in some cases (too apparent, too obvious, one supposes) that no other interpretation of the content will do half so well. If a spinster dreams of erotic relations with a man, or of being attacked in any way by a man, we are likely to take the dream at its sexual face value and regard it as a wish-fulfilment, literal or only very thinly veiled. If, however, she dreams of sexual relations with, say, a goat, or of being attacked by a large dog, we are almost certain to invoke the shades of ancient historians, myths, and fairy tales, and to superimpose elaborate analyses upon the presumed symbolism of the animal sex partner.
Schrenk-Notzing told of a woman who, while masturbating, fantasised about herself being covered by a stallion. Such cases - animal sex partners in masturbation fantasies - are also far from rare, and these too send us off on analytic and scholarly safaris in pursuit of the elusive and massively complex symbolic content - which would not be the case were the stallion rather a handsome young man. But it is at least worth considering whether, in a good many cases, the dreamer does not simply desire, as a variant of normal relations and perhaps for more profound reasons, coition with a goat; and whether the stallion is not, in the masturbation fantasy, simply a stallion (that is to say, an erect, indefatigable, and very large phallus adjoined as it happens, to a horse - a creature credited by popular imagination with such virile phallic endowments). {18}
Women are said to dream not infrequently of being attacked, sometimes in an overtly sexual way, by wolves. The dream seldom has to do, one supposes - and especially nowadays when "wolf" is a common sexual slang term referring to the erotically aggressive male - with a desire for actual bestial intercourse with that animal. The improbability that such intercourse could ever be actually effected is great and, along with the symbolism and mythic and legendary material associated in such wealth with the wolf, inclines us to the belief that the dream-lover is symbolic. A dream of sexual relations with a dog, on the other hand, may be considerably more evidential of desire for exactly such a contact, though of course the dog may function as a symbol just as well as may the wolf or some other creature.
The point is that it is surely an error to understand all animals appearing in sexual dreams and fantasies as symbols. The literal or semi-literal wish-fulfilling dream and fantasy is a reality here as elsewhere, and quite possibly rates first interpretation consideration in cases where, as with a dog, the chances of translating fantasy into action are not too remote. Norman Haire, as mentioned, and other scholars, have agreed that the prevalence of bestiality in the Greek myths indicates that the Greeks found this relationship attractive, or at least, as Dr. Haire puts it, not revolting. By extension, similar sentiments may be attributed to other peoples whose myths and literature deal extensively with the subject (the crucial point being, in my view, not so much that the behaviour is attributed to the gods, as that it is repeatedly dealt with in an imaginative and not unattractive way).
In the light of the foregoing, we might now take a look at bestiality as it occurs in mythology, examining some of the myths of various nations and peoples, but especially those of the Greeks and Romans. The survey will be, of course, by no means exhaustive; nor need it be exhaustive to indicate the spirit in which the subject of bestiality was mythologically approached.
In ancient Egypt, the goddess Mut, assuming the form of a cow, was loved by the god Among. Bast, the cat-goddess, had human lovers, and was a patroness of sexual pleasures and fertility, also protecting her devotees from venereal diseases. Dog-headed apes (Thoth), cows (Hathor, later Aphrodite), and bulls (Mont, or Menthu) copulated with humans. The great god Ptah, the Egyptian mythologists related, inseminated a virgin heifer, and as a result of this union was himself reborn as the Bull Apis, which resided at the temple of Ptah where he was tended and reverenced by the priests.
When a sacred bull, supposed to be Ptah or Apis, died, it was mummified after a lavish funeral and buried in an immense tomb of pink granite, after which another bull took its place. The god Osiris, his body cut into fourteen fragments by Set, was magically put together again and restored to life by Isis, his wife and sister. Missing only, when this restoration was completed, was the god's penis which had been eaten by a crab, the Oxyrhynchid. Isis, enraged at being thus deprived of the phallus of Osiris, cursed eternally the Oxyrhynchid - a curse which resulted in social strife and even warfare among the Egyptians, though that story cannot be related here.
Among the Assyro-Babylonians, Ishtar, goddess of voluptuousness, was worshipped in Erech, city of the sacred courtesans, and when she descended to earth she brought with her an extensive entourage of strumpets. She had innumerable lovers - men, animals, and gods - and whosoever lay with her was sure to be rewarded with cruelty or death. In the case of animals, lions seduced by this barbaric and nymphomaniacal goddess later fell into pits where they were impaled on sharp stakes, while stallions who served her insatiable venery were afterwards condemned to heavy labours, beatings, and starvation.
Chinese mythologists told of a beautiful young woman whose father had been kidnapped by pirates, and who vowed to marry the one who managed to save him. The vow was overheard by her horse, who coveted her lustfully, and who managed to rescue the father and restore him safely to his family. But when the horse came forward to claim the young woman as his wife, the outraged father ordered the animal slain and skinned - an inadequate measure after all, since the skin returned to life and made off with the girl. She was however, spared the ordeal of becoming the horse's bride when her plight came to the attention of the ever-watchful August Personage of Jade, who turned her into a silkworm and installed her as a favourite among his concubines.
In Teutonic mythology, Valkyries in the form of swans sometimes mated with men. One of these "swan-maidens" was the Valkyrie Kara, mistress of the mighty warrior Helgi. She customarily accompanied her lover into battle, where she would help him achieve victory for the Icelanders, but one day Helgi raised his sword to smite an enemy and accidentally killed his mistress, Kara, who was flying just overhead. Helgi's sorrow, it is recorded, was not to be assuaged, and endured for the remainder of his tormented life.
The Middle Ages offered the charming tale of Melusina, the water sprite who married Raymond, son of the Count de la Foret. Six days of the week the beautiful Melusina lived with Raymond as his wife, but on Saturdays she retired to her tub - her lower body becoming that of a fish or a serpent. Her many children born of the union, were all monstrously deformed in one way or another, but despite their handicaps distinguished themselves among men by their intelligence and courage. (There are of course many stories of the unions of men with mermaids, undines, and similar beings. Since the lower bodies of mermaids are those of fish - posing certain problems where copulation with mortal males is concerned - it was necessary to endow these creatures in many cases with the power [possessed by Melusina] of transforming themselves into human form. On the other hand, certain ingenious souls resolved the problem by endowing the mermaids with two fish tails, which take the place of legs, and which allow for the female genitalia to be situated between them as with human females.
There is an abundance of scientific evidence, or what passed for it in the Middle Ages and some other periods, for existence of mermaids, including many eye-witness accounts of mermaids and mermen captured or closely observed. The most impressive, however, is the report of seven mermaids and mermen captured by the fishermen and turned over to the Jesuits. They were all dissected by Bosquez, physician to the Viceroy of Goa, who described both their internal and external structure, asserting that they were quite similar to human beings. This was in 1560, and the capture took place near the island of Mandar, off Ceylon. Just three decades earlier, another merman had been captured and was presented to Sigismund, king of Poland, who kept the creature at court for several days, where it was seen by hundreds. The King of Portugal, it is further reported by historians, was once involved in a lawsuit over the possession of a mermaid.)
Turning to the Greeks and the Romans, the bestial amours of Zeus, ascendant to the throne of Olympus, were many and varied. As a bull, he raped Demeter, who bore Persephone, and lay later with Persephone also, though this (incestuous) time in the form of a serpent. Also as a bull, Zeus lecherously embraced Europa; while in swan form he copulated with Leda - an event much commemorated by artists, including Da Vinci and Michelangelo. In another assault, artistically recaptured by Watteau, he ravished the sleeping Antiope, this time as a satyr, and as a result were born twins, which the mother left to die on a mountainside. As an eagle, Zeus bore away and made his mistress the nymph Aegina, who gave birth to Aeacus. In the form of a cuckoo, he seduced his sister, Hera, who yielded to him only, however, on the condition that he afterwards marry her. As a pigeon, Zeus accomplished the seduction of Phthia, and as a stallion he fornicated with Dia, wife of Ixion. Almost equally ravenous along bestial lines was Poseidon, whose amours are distinctive on two counts: Probably no other deity spawned more or more hideous monsters as a result of his sexual unions.
Poseidon was also given to assuming beast form in order to ravish women also transformed into beasts. Thus, as a stallion he overpowered and ravished Demeter, who had assumed the shape of a mare in an attempted to escape him. Two offspring were born - a daughter, and Arion, a wild horse with human right feet and the power of speech. Demeter, it may be added, could claim the distinction of having been raped once by a bull (Zeus), and once by a stallion (Poseidon). Probably no other goddess could make that statement. Also in the form of a horse, Poseidon gained carnal knowledge of Medusa - an event which occurred in the temple of Athena; and it was for this profanation that Athena punished Medusa by turning her hair into writhing serpents.
Like Demeter, Theophane was transformed into an animal - though by Poseidon himself - and as a ewe received his embraces, the god having taken the form of a ram. Of their union was born the famous ram with the golden fleece. Other animals and monstrous beings could claim Poseidon as their paternal procreator, including the Molionids, the Aloadae, and the Cyclops Polyphemus, whose single eye was put out by Odysseus. It was also Poseidon's doing that Pasiphae conceived her raging passion for the bull, which the god instilled in her after being angered by her husband, Minos, king of Crete. As a result of Pasiphae's impudicity was born, of course, the Minotaur - a monster with the upper body and head of a bull, the lower body of a man, destined to be slain by the hero Theseus.
Hermes, pander and procurer for Zeus, homosexual seducer of youths, and the god credited with bringing the gift of masturbation to mankind, was himself a bestialist, lying as a he-goat with Penelope, who bore Pan - though that is only one of many accounts of the god Pan's origin. Arcadia was sexually assaulted by a bull, which was slain by Argus. Pan assumed the form of a white ram the better to seduce Selene, the moon-goddess.
The centaur Eurytion sought to ravish Hippodameia, bride of Peirithous, king of the Lapiths, but was thwarted, and as a consequence the Centaurs and the Lapiths fought a bloody battle, with the Centaurs being defeated and driven into exile. The Centaurs, half-men, half-horses, were said by some to have come into being when Centaurus - spawn of the union of Ixion with a cloud in the form of Hera - coupled bestially with mares. The Centaurs, remembered for their lechery far more than the Satyrs, were lascivious, cruel and drunken, forever inflamed by lust, rapists by predilection.
The god Apollo, in serpent form, indulged his lubricity with Atys, and as a tortoise achieved yet other amorous successes. The wind god Boreas took stallion shape to mate with mares, and resulting were the dozen famous light-footed horses who could run over the sea without wetting their feet. The sirens, half-bestial creatures, were notorious succubae, preying upon mortal men, who were afterwards destroyed. Atalanta, daughter of Iasus, was suckled by a bear and raised by hunters. Herself a huntress, she struck down two Centaurs, Rhaecus and Hylaeus, who attempted forcibly to penetrate her. Later, she was turned into a lion, along with her husband, for the crime of profaning the temple of Zeus.
The temple of Faunus, or Lupercus, was situated at the grotto where the she-wolf suckled Romulus and Remus, founders of Rome. There, priests, disguised as animals in the skins of goats, dogs, and wolves, flagellated and fornicated with women desirous of fecundation. Faunus himself, according to Ovid, was an ever-concupiscent deity who once attempted, by mistake, to rape Hercules, an undeviating heterosexual and athlete of the boudoir who once deflowered and cudgelled to climax all fifty daughters of Thespios in a single night, saw little humour in the mistaken identity and outraged, thrashed Faunus soundly for his attempted assault. One recalls, too, that the orgiastic festivities in honour of Fauna - wife, daughter, or both, of Faunus - were renowned as being even more frenetically lubricious than the Lupercalia of Faunus himself. The Silvanus, a satyr-like Latin divinity physically resembling Pan, was an agricultural, or aboricultural, god whose father, a shepherd, sired him by spilling his seed in a she-goat.
And so on. The list could be much extended, but the examples are doubtless sufficient (save for placating those whose interest in these matters perhaps transcends legitimate scholarly boundaries).
Apart from myths, and an abundance of folklore - largely, and lamentably in this case, not set down by authors - there are many literary works dealing to some extent with, or skirting the edges of, bestiality. There are paintings, sculptures, films, outright pornography, sermons, moralisings, occultist works, philosophising, scholarly and scientific treatises, and so on - an impressive mass of material when one considers the supposed comparative rarity of, and lack of general interest in, the phenomenon of bestiality.
The Psychopathia Sexualis of Krafft-Ebing was the prototype for many subsequent catalogues of sexual aberrations, some of them obviously more literary than "scientific," which describe cases of persons who have come to the attention of physicians and/or the law as a result of engaging in bestial relationships. However, bestiality tends to receive even less than its due, which is relatively slight, in such encyclopaedic volumes, where male and female homosexuality, sadism and masochism, fetishism, and similarly oft-encountered deviations receive, appropriately, most of the space and the author's best efforts.
Nor is the short shrift accorded bestiality in the comprehensive works compensated for, as is the case with most esoteric facets of eroticism, by a special technical literature; of works in the English language dealing exclusively with bestiality, I am acquainted only with four, and of these only one in any way pretends or intends to adequately survey the subject. Three are slender booklets: Bestiality and the Law, and Bestiality in Ancient and Modern Times, both by Niemoller; and Animal Contacts by that prolific pamphleteer, Dr. D. O. Cauldwell. All three booklets were published by the late Haldeman-Julius and are still rather easy to obtain.
The fourth is a full-length work, Bestiality by Gaston Dubois-Desaulle, published in a limited edition of two thousand copies by the Panurge Press, New York, in 1933. The book was written at a considerably earlier date, but the well-informed notes supplied by the translator are helpful in bringing it up to date as of the time of publication. Even now, in 1960, Bestiality remains the best - indeed, the only - major source book in English for students of this subject. Unfortunately, copies are rather expensive and difficult to come by, and it might be hoped that the book will be reissued and further "modernized" in the light of contemporary writings of psychologists, anthropologists, attorneys, and others who have, since the early 1930's, shed additional illumination on the subject from their respective vantage points.
Of literary works dealing with human-animal sex relationships, in a major way or only slightly, the following list can be compiled, but again the list is not at all intended to be exhaustive. The Golden Ass of Apuleius, The Arabian Nights, The Pentameron, Mace's l ' Abbe en Belle Humour, Balzac's famous desert love tale of the soldier and the pantheress, Louis Noir's Le Lion du Sedan, Charpentier's Le Roman d'un Singe, Emile Dodillon's Hemo, Rachilde's l ' Animale, Scheffer's La Charmeuse, Crowley's White Stains, Memoirs of a Russian Princess, Beardsley's Venus and Tannenhauser, Herbert's A Night in a Moorish Harem, Robinson Jeffers' Roan Stallion, Clement Wood's The Monkey, the anonymous Lascivious Hypocrite, Djuna Barne's Nightwood, March Hastings' Obsessed, Jean Dutourd's A Dog's Head, Mandiargues' The Girl Beneath the Lion, R. E. L. Masters' Mishka Rediscovered, W. B. Yeats' Leda and the Swan, and many others - including, especially, a host of pornographic novels not generally available.
An example of bestiality as it occurs in the pornographic novel is to be found in The Lascivious Hypocrite, mentioned above, where a woman copulates with a dog for the benefit of enraptured voyeurs. The novel, A Dog's Head, is of interest in that it explores, by means of a half-animal hero who is attracted to both canine and human females, the problem of man's relationship to other animals generally; and considers also, from this imaginative perspective, man's body-mind dualism, the problem of man's "animal nature," etc.
In addition to the above-mentioned works I have encountered on several occasions references to a recent and reportedly superior French novel which relates the erotic love of a young girl for a stallion, but unfortunately I cannot give the title of this work, having been unable to track it down. It has been suggested that another example of bestiality in literature is to be found in Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue, but I personally find this assertion about as plausible as I would find the view that zoophilia is the dominant theme of Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes series.
Bestiality, or other perverse content, has also been attributed to such children's favourites as Little Red Riding Hood and Beauty and the Beast - and in the case of the latter, some of the illustrations produced from time to time in connection with this charming tale would clearly indicate that it is at least subject to that interpretation in some minds. Where the other story is concerned, we are told both that Little Red Riding-Hood "likes the wolf in bed," and that there is more to the wolf's devouring of grandma than the discerning childish reader admits to his more inhibited and therefore less perceptive elders.
I, however, am here inclined to go along with Dr. F. S. Perls, as quoted in Eisler's Man Into Wolf, who asserts that the wolf's eating of granny has nothing to do with sex: The wolf is simply hungry, and in that prosaic fashion is related to an empty belly. However, the story is a very interesting one, certainly lending itself to a variety of interpretations, and when so perceptive a writer as Djuna Barnes manages to find something subtle, sexual, and sinister in it, we should hesitate to assert dogmatically that what she finds is altogether absent.
Phyllis and Eberhard Kronhausen (Pornograthy and the Law) observe that bestiality is an almost invariable and essential ingredient of the obscene book. They further remark that such subject matters as human-animal sex contacts is very likely to run afoul of censors and other vigilant guardians of the public morals - one reason, certainly for the paucity of zoophilic and zooerastic material in American fiction. Bestiality is also a stock ingredient of collections of obscene and pornographic photographs and drawings, and, less commonly - owing, one supposes, to casting difficulties - is encountered on pornographic or obscene motion pictures.
In this regard, the eminent sexologist Iwan Bloch discovered that especially popular among the salacious photos and French postcards of his day were those portraying acts of sodomy (one supposes that the gamut of bestial relations, and not just anal intercourse, is meant by "sodomy") between humans on one hand and asses, monkeys, and dogs on the other. The present-day variety of pornographic (bestiality) photos is perhaps greater than in Bloch's time, though still less than extensive as compared to the range of photographic portrayal of some other sexual deviations.
Human-animal sex intercourse was long a favourite subject of theologians, who titillated their congregations of readers and pew sitters with descriptions, often graphic, of such unconscionable and damnable lubricities. Dingwall (The American Woman) tells us, for example, that the erotopathic witch-hunter Cotton Mather, as we might expect, was much concerned with this matter. "Mather tells one tale," writes Dingwell, "of a man whom everybody believed to be a saintly character until his particular predilections were made public. We do not know why this husband and father seemed to prefer the lower creation, but Mather assures us that he had had a cow, two heifers, three sheep and two sows, whilst his wife had actually seen him having relations with a bitch and his son had once caught him 'hideously conversing with a sow.' "
It is not unlikely that Mather drew the inspiration for his account of this detestable and heinous career of vice from a then recent case in Scotland, rather than from amongst the ranks of his own flock of sheep. The case was that of Major Thomas Weir, a prominent evangelical leader and pillar of community life, who was executed in 1670, when he was a septuagenarian, after confessing to bestiality, incest, and assorted other enormities.
As early as 1651 - nineteen years previous to his confession - this eminent holy man had been apprehended whilst sodomizing a mare by a woman who lodged a complaint against him. So hallowed was his reputation, however, that he was not only able to evade punishment or even suspicion himself, but was able to have his accuser flogged through the streets of Lanark by a hangman, as was only appropriate for the chastisement of one conceiving so base and baseless a slander.
Weir had already been careless where incest was concerned. He had been caught in bed with his sister years before by his sister-in-law, who revealed at Weir's trial that when she happened upon the brother and sister, they were "lying together in the barn at Wicket-Shaw, and that they were both naked in the bed together, and that she was above him, and that the bed did shake, and that she heard some scandalous language between them." In view of the treatment accorded his other accuser, Weir's sister-in-law did well, at the time of her discovery of the incest, to keep silent.
And it was not until he was seventy-six years of age, and confessed, that Weir's life of pious hypocrisy and outrageous crime, hitherto veiled by an aura of sanctity, came to light. He was then, on his own confession, charged with attempting to rape his sister Jane when she was ten, and with incestuously cohabiting with her from her sixteenth through her fiftieth year, when he "loathed her for her age"; also with incestuously lying with his stepdaughter, Margaret Bourdon; with several and diverse adulteries; with clandestine copulations, over a period of twenty years, with his serving maid; and with bestiality with mares and cows.
Though he was not formally accused of it, testimony also indicated that Weir was a powerful sorcerer, heretic and blasphemer, and a consulter of witches, necromancers, devils, and other disreputable and diabolic persons and spirits. It is generally believed nowadays - as indeed it was by a good many at the time - that old Major Weir was insane, and that his offences were all or mostly imaginary. {19}
If we are to define pornography as that which by intent (conscious or unconscious) has the primary effect of titillating the erotic sensibilities, then it is at once apparent that preachers and other theologians have probably been the most persistent and ardent pornographers to be found in any distinguishable group within the ranks of humanity. Certainly, the theological writings down the ages include a sizeable portion of the obscenity created by man, the writings of Catholic theologians and the recorded lives of the saints being especially noteworthy in this respect. As for bestiality, where can one find it dealt with more often, at greater length, or more passionately and leeringly than in the writings of the fathers of the Church? And how, one wonders - as if one did not know - are the censors able so consistently to overlook these facts?
The art of bestiality is more extensive than the creative literature, and only a few examples will be mentioned. Many others are to be found in such works as the famous Bilder Lexikon dur Erotik, Titanen Eroyik, Japanischen Erotik, and similar volumes, and in the world's larger collections of erotica. Additionally, one may find a good many examples of art works portraying bestiality, and the related "demonality," in the works of the classical demonologists and other writers on witchcraft. A notion of this current class of works may be obtained from an excellent current volume, Robbins' Encyclopaedia of Witchcraft and Demonology .
Of the more famous paintings, we have already mentioned Da Vinci's Leda and the Swan, which is innocuous, the Leda of Michelangelo, which was presumably more potent, and a number of paintings by lesser artists dealing with this same mythological incident. The Leda and the Swan of Michelangelo, unfortunately, was destroyed by a puritanical minister of Louis XIII, after the Duke of Ferrara, who commissioned the painting, had sent it to France, to the court of Francis I, for fear that it would fall into the hands of the Inquisition. Mention has been made, too, of the Antiope and Satyre, painted by Watteau, which now hangs in the Louvre. An Abduction of Europa is to be seen at the National Museum, Palermo, and I am uncertain whether this painting is Titian's, also called Rape of Europa, or another.
There is also a Rape of Deienira, by Pollaiuolo, and a great many other paintings might be listed of women in more or less specifically sexual relation to centaurs, satyrs, and other half-bestial mythical beings, of which Rubens' Nymphs and Satyrs is one of the more famous examples. Pasiphae and the Bull, like Leda and the Swan, was a favourite subject of Renaissance painters, and quite a few of these works are still to be seen in the various European galleries and museums.
Sex lore, myths, art works, etc., dealing with the intercourse of women with snakes are usually to be understood as allegorical, the snake being symbolic - representing the phallus, the principle of evil, or whatever - but that is not to say that every representation of this kind is to be understood as symbolic. We know, for example, that the snake - and the crocodile and lizard, which sometimes substitute for the snake in myth and dreams - has been used sexually by humans.
In the Berlin Museum fur Vulkerkunde there are or were several sculptures with this subject matter, though whether they refer to myths or actual happenings or are to be understood still otherwise I have not attempted to determine. One carved wooden figure is of a crocodile inserting his snout into a woman's vagina; another is of a crocodile emerging from a woman's vulva; while a third is a representation of a snake preparing to make its entrance into a human vagina.
The Naples Museum has or had a highly regarded piece of marble statuary found at Herculaneum, which affords the spectacle of a satyr having sexual relations with a goat. Somewhat similarly, the Renaissance poet and diplomat Aretino noted that in the Palazzo Chigi there was a sculpture of a "marble satyr attempting a boy." Whether the work still exists, I cannot say. But Aretino, arguing from this work and its acceptance, made a plea for freedom from prudishness and hypocrisy in the arts, urging specifically that human sexual intercourse be recognized as an appropriate subject for the painter and sculptor. ("What is the harm if we see how a man mounts a woman? Shall animals enjoy more freedom than men?")
In the temples of India, too, are to be found some notable examples of sculpture, the figures being humans in sexual connection with animals (and with other humans, both children and adults). A famous Gothic cathedral once sported a naked nun erotically besieged by monkeys.
In addition to the erotic episodes in frankly pornographic motion pictures which display women, and occasionally men and children, in intercourse with animals - usually dogs and ponies - there have been produced a large number of popular films which suggest in varying degrees of specificity the possibility of bestial intercourse, usually brought about by kidnapping and subsequent rape (which last would occur if the heroine were not, as she invariably is, rescued just in time to prevent it).
A good many examples of the cinematic art have been produced, for instance, in which women are carried off into the jungles by apes and gorillas, and that these are very popular with audiences is made clear by the frequency with which they are selected to illustrate the large posters found in the fronts of the theatres where the films are being shown. Even so, I wonder if we may assume, as some writers in the subject have, that the majority of the audiences are consciously responding to an erotic (bestiality) situation - that they expect the women to be ravished by the animals.
It may well be that a good many spectators, consciously or unconsciously, do entertain such precisely defined erotic expectations, but I think it equally likely that a good many others do not, deriving their thrills, instead, from the anticipation that the women will be killed, agonizingly, of course (which may also afford erotic gratification to the spectator, but in a somewhat different way than most amateur analysts suppose).
Closely related are the so-called monster movies, or horror films, where the heroine, usually in a filmy negligee or with clothing revealingly torn or dishevelled, is borne off by Frankenstein's monster, the Wolf Man, the Mummy, the Mole man, or some similar creature. Here the erotic element is more manifest - perhaps because the monster may in most cases be presumed to have human or human-like genitalia and more nearly human desires - and is probably understood by a considerably greater portion of the audience, including the children who especially appreciate, as evidenced by their attendance, productions of this kind.
A film like the ever-popular King Kong, a classic of the genre, raises some special questions. The heroine is an attractive young woman, scantily attired (clothing ripped to expose one breast, etc.); the giant ape Kong is obviously attracted to her in a way that can scarcely be other than erotic; but the sexual element is discouraged (intentionally minimized or kept in check?) by the extreme disparity between the physical dimensions of Kong on the one hand and those of the girl on the other. One wonders, indeed, if much of the film's appeal is not bound up with this (actually somewhat tragic) situation in which the monstrous Kong finds himself loving a human female who can neither return his affection nor fulfil his desires.
In most of such films the spectator is able to find pretty much what he wants (and is equipped) to find. The possibility of a strongly erotic interpretation is unquestionably present, but the film may still be understood and appreciated if the eroticism is excluded from the spectator's appreciation. For this and other reasons, I would suggest that it is an error to insist that bestiality is necessarily present and well-defined in a great many jungle, travel, and monster films; or to insist, at any rate, that the films must be understood in this way, and that the audiences, in large part, so understand them. Unless the eroticism is quite explicit, and it rather rarely is, we should consider that it is more a matter of the spectator bringing the bestiality motif to the film than of the film offering this motif as more than an alternative interpretative possibility to the spectator.
In concluding this particular discussion, I think it may be said without fear of serious challenge that bestiality appeals greatly to the human imagination, which is not to suggest that this implies a general desire for active participation. But it is a matter of record that bestiality has appealed, aesthetically as subject matter for their work, to some of the very greatest writers and artists and to many lesser minds and talents. There is something strangely beautiful in the vision of Leda's submission to the swan, and in similar scenes wherein women are embraced by stallions, bulls, and the great cats. The mating of man and ape has about it the aesthetic allure of the grotesque. It has been said that bestiality is "a vice of clodhoppers," but it must be acknowledged that it is equally, in fantasy at least, the pleasure of the most highly developed imaginations and the keenest aesthetic sensibilities.
PSYCHICAL BESTIALITY
By "psychical bestiality" I mean practices which yield erotic gratification or stimulation as a result of behaviour in which animals figure, but in which there is no direct physical sexual contact between the human and the beast.
This would include, for example, sexual stimulation, sometimes to orgasm, as a result of watching animals copulate with one another - a practice to which has been given the formidable nomenclature "mixoscopic zoophilia"; similar stimulation derived by watching exhibitions of bestiality; masturbation fantasies of animal-human or animal-animal sex relations; day-dreaming to orgasm or excitation with bestiality fantasies; fur or (animal) hair fetishism; bestiality in books, art works, or photographs experienced as an erotic stimulus; nocturnal emissions with bestiality the subject of the dream;{20} fantasies of animal torture with accompanying stimulation; erotic fantasies of humans attacked and mutilated by beasts; and so on.
Of these, only the first two - gratification or stimulation derived from exhibitions of animal-animal and animal-human sex contacts - will be discussed at any length here. Exhibitions of animal intercourse have always been popular, and were especially so in modern times in France and England of the eighteenth century, when the nobility (as was also true of the Renaissance) particularly delighted in witnessing the copulations of stallions with mares.
Havelock Ellis, in The Psychology of Sex, related a number of interesting cases of persons sexually excited and/or otherwise gratified by the spectacle of animal intercourse. In this regard he correctly observed that "the coupling of the larger animals is often an impressive and splendid spectacle which is far, indeed, from being obscene, and has commended itself to persons of intellectual distinction." He also noted however, and again correctly, that such sights may be, especially where "ill-balanced minds" are concerned, both prurient and morbid.{21}
As an instance of the latter, he cites the case of a nun, "sexually hyperaesthetic," who was powerfully aroused by the sight, or even the recollection, of flies in sexual connection. Ever since childhood, such a sight had caused her to masturbate compulsively, and she recalled having this experience, after becoming a nun, more than four hundred times.
As instances of highly-developed intellects and sensibilities attracted to the spectacle of the intercourse of animals, Ellis cites the Countess of Pembroke and the rather notorious Pope Alexander VI (and his daughter, Lucrezia Borgia): "The Countess of Pembroke, Sir Philip Sidney's sister, appears to have found sexual enjoyment in the contemplation of the sexual prowess of stallions. Aubrey writes that she 'was very salacious and she had a contrivance that in the spring of the year ... the stallions ... were to be brought before such a part of the house where she had a vidette to look on them.' ... Although the modern editor's modesty has caused the disappearance of several lines from this passage, the general sense is clear.
In the same century (the fifteenth) Burchard, the faithful secretary of Pope Alexander VI, describes in his invaluable diary how four race horses were brought to two mares in a court of the Vatican, the horses clamorously fighting for the possession of the mares and eventually mounting them, while the Pope and his daughter Lucrezia looked on from a window 'cum magno risu et delectatione.' ..."{22}
To this we will append the datum that several of the Roman emperors, also men of highly developed imaginations and aesthetic sensibilities, took similar delight in spectacles of animal copulations, and of bestial connections as well. Sexual arousal at the sight of animals copulating has been reported by a great many persons, both famous and obscure, who have added that such arousal leads sometimes to acts of bestiality, sometimes to masturbation, and occasionally to heterosexual coitus with anyone available. (That the latter result may be forthcoming has always been well known to operators of houses of prostitution, who have staged exhibitions of animal coitus and of bestiality for the express purpose of stimulating the carnal appetites of their patrons and thus inducing them to avail themselves of the services of the waiting ladies of pleasure.)
That witnessing animal intercourse may have a somewhat loftier effect is evidenced by the case of the late Wilhelm Reich. Dr Reich, we are told, was motivated by his boyhood interest in such phenomena to pursue a scientific career, which he did with the greatest distinction. Havelock Ellis found a symbolic character present in spectacles of animal coition, and an "association by resemblance; the animal sexual act recalls the human sexual act; the animal becomes the symbol of the human being."{23} This observation, which will be found to be true in at least a sizable number of cases, raises an interesting question: To what extent does the human individual participating in an act of bestiality regard the animal sex partner as a person?
There is probably no sexual anomaly which does not in some sense, in at least some of the cases, posit its object as human or as related to the human. In bestiality this occurs when human qualities, especially emotional ones, are anthropomorphically and/or empathetically attributed to the beast. Even when, to take a very extreme example, the tail of a fish is inserted into a woman's vagina and she derives gratification from its squirming movements, we are in fact dealing with a variety of masturbation, in this case with a kind of verge or penis-substitute, the use of which implies an awareness of the human sex partner as absent and therefore compensated for by the employment of an object which is used in lieu of the missing phallus and thus invested with certain of its attributes.
But to return to bestiality in its more common forms, when it is not merely masturbation with only a substitute for the human penis; here, the bestialist substitutes the animal for another person in at least some sense. In extreme cases, he woos it, as he might woo another person, with caresses and love play, attempting to excite it. He anticipates that the animal will derive gratification from its intercourse with him, as another person would, and he is disappointed if this reaction does not occur. In general, he attributes to the animal partner a variety of human, as distinguished from animal, emotional and even intellectual capacities and responses - in short, regards it as a personality, a human-like consciousness which differs from him erotically more in form than in spirit. This is, in part why individuals are able to "fall in love" with animals, especially with those animals with which they have had repeated sexual experiences (and repeated opportunity to expand and perfect the personalization process).
Such anomalous falling in love, or zoophilia, would usually not occur if a more or less humanistic consciousness and emotionality were not attributed to the animal which, by virtue of this humanization, in addition to its ready compliance with the human sex desires, is able to fulfil in at least some measure the role of a human love-object. (It is even an inducement for the zoophile, in some cases, that the beast's "fidelity" is [optimistically] regarded as certain; and that, where human females especially are concerned, there is no likelihood of an unwanted pregnancy resulting from the relationship, though this last is, of course, a practical consideration, distinct from the problem of anthropomorphism.)
On the other hand, the animal-as-animal exerts its appeal also in bestiality relationships, and especially so, one supposes, in the case of the more intelligent and imaginative spectator whose appreciation is in large part based precisely upon the idea of the union of the man or the woman with the beast. The voluptuary, the roué, and the sophisticate, not lacking in opportunities for human sex contacts, are not at all likely to resort to the humanization of animals by either spectator association or participant anthropomorphism. For who, after all, craving voyeuristic stimulation, and able to observe the more intricate and skilful and - if so regarded - depraved love-making of humans, would substitute for this experience the witnessing of the copulations of animals if the animals were then to be humanized through an "association by resemblance" such as Ellis suggested?
Exhibitions of human-animal sex intercourse have never received the psychological analysis and other attention they quite richly merit. It is true that research in this area would present many problems, but the insight achieved might well be worth the trouble. Bestiality exhibitions have been popular throughout recorded human history, and it is evident therefore, that they fulfil profound psychological cravings on the part of the spectators, and perhaps on the part of the human participants as well.
Looking at the matter only superficially, it is probably safe to suppose that these spectacles are enjoyed, (1) because of their bizarre erotic character which appeals to the imagination, and especially to the visual aesthetic sense; (2) there is a strong element of sadistic gratification for the spectator, resulting from the assumed degradation of the prostitute through her contact with a lower animal; (3) cravings for bestial intercourse may be vicariously appeased, without the guilt which would be engendered if the spectator himself (or herself) participated in such an encounter; and (4) there is the pleasurable sexual excitation which results from watching almost any kind of erotic behaviour, experienced by most persons who are not, as a result of artificially imposed moral inhibitions, conditioned to revulsion or strong disapproval or the up welling of painful guilt feelings.
There is, of course, also the true voyeur, for whom such spectacles are a means to complete sexual gratification; and doubtless many other motivations and sources of gratification could also be mentioned. As for the prostitute or other person coupling with the animal under these conditions, it is likely that (1) masochistic cravings are satisfied by means of the implied degradation which is greatly intensified by the fact that an audience bears witness to the "shame" of the participant; (2) exhibitionistic urges may be gratified; (3) there may be considerable indifference to the performance on the part of the prostitute, whose only conscious motive may be a desire for financial reward (while no profound unconscious needs or purposes are involved); and (4) there may be actual erotic gratification, accompanied probably by one or more of the aforementioned responses, but with paramount emphasis on the physical and psychological pleasures resulting from the act as experienced apart from any responses contingent upon the other factors mentioned.
Again, it is to be assumed that thorough analysis, based upon extensive on-the-spot observations, interviews, etc., would yield other motivations and sources of gratification. Additionally, it would be most illuminating to learn the ease or difficulty with which animals are taught to perform under the conditions of the bestiality exhibition - conditions which may vary greatly, ranging from the boisterous climate of the "smoker" to the sultry exoticism encountered in brothels catering to a sensualistic clientele whose voluptuousness is greatly refined.
BESTIALITY AS PERVERSION
In general, the perverted individual will be defined here as one who, for whatever reason, has been diverted from the normal path of heterosexuality and who is, therefore, unable to express himself (or herself) sexually with, or to feel loving toward, a normal opposite-sex love-object. At the same time, the path of normal love and normal sexuality being closed to him, he has broken - or, better, irrupted - through the barriers erected against his love and his sexuality, but in an abnormal or deviant way, so that the course his love and/or sexuality takes is toward an abnormal love-object.
The sex pervert is thus a man or woman who (1) is unable to love and to derive sexual gratification from a normal love-object; and (2) possesses desires, equally as intense as those of the normal individual, for an abnormal love-object. This object is determined in its natures not by any vicious volition of the pervert but by psychological or physiological factors, or a combination of these - inborn, acquired, or both. For the practical purposes of the discussion to follow, this view does not differ much from the more common one that the sexual perversion is a form or mode of sexual activity which, for the deviate, supplants the heterosexual coitus regarded as the normal and healthy method of sexual expression natural to mankind.
Also, in this common view, in true sexual perversion the perverted individual usually has no desire for normal coitus, or is unable to obtain gratification from it or to perform it and instead must, or at least greatly prefers to, obtain his sexual gratification from the mode of sexual activity peculiar to his perversion. By either view, and by most others as well, there is no such thing, speaking precisely, as a perverted sexual act; rather, there are only the sexual acts of perverted persons, which are called "perverted acts" for reasons of linguistic convenience - a facility purchased at the expense both of accuracy and justice.
When we understand clearly that the perversion resides in the pathological psychology of the pervert, of which in his case the act is a symptom, then we will understand, too, that the behaviour is diseased because the individual is diseased - and not the reverse. That is to say, it is not necessarily true that we may infer from a specific sexual act, even an extreme one, which happens to be the one performed by a certain kind of pervert, that all acts of this kind are perversions and that all individuals who engage in such acts are perverted.
This is especially clear in the case of bestiality. It is true that there is a perversion - bestiality (or zoophilia) - in which the pervert's desires are exclusively, or customarily and preferentially, and for reasons beyond the individual's control, directed towards animals rather than towards humans of the opposite sex who are desired as partners in coition. However, and as should have been made clear by now, in considering all acts of sexual intercourse with animals we find that only a small minority of these are performed by perverted individuals - that is, by those who can only obtain gratification in this way, or who are only feebly stimulated by the sex-object socially and legally regarded as legitimate.
(The injustice stemming from the linguistic convenience mentioned above results, of course, from the fact that when we customarily speak of a particular act as being perverted, or a perversion, then we habitually go on from there to assume that whoever engages in the so-called perversion is a pervert - which is obviously not the case.) But if we thus distinguish between pervert and non-pervert, and classify as perverted only those who fulfil the conditions of the definition, do we not then deprive the non-pervert offender of what might be his only defence - that he is "a medical problem" - against a charge of outright viciousness and corruption? Under present legislation, which deals erroneously in "perverted acts," and which almost all authorities agree, is outmoded and based upon notions of what is sinful rather than, rationally, upon what is socially deleterious, it might well be that this is the case.
(Though, of course, it is not quite so simple as all that, and such words as "vicious" and "corrupt" can, in any case, scarcely be brought into play with validity. And moreover, however much my sympathies may lie with the individual subjected to irrational legalistic persecutions as the result of a minor transgression, it is still not my task here to refrain from pursuing factuality in order to leave standing loopholes through which the offender may slip to avoid punishment, however unjust.)
Of the cases of bestiality mentioned in the foregoing brief historical survey it will probably be accepted by almost everyone that many are by no stretch of the imagination instances of sexual perversion.I refer to human-animal sex relationships practiced as a means to other than erotic gratification, such as religious bestiality, in which the sex act is a metaphysically meaningful ritual or an act of worship; magical bestiality, in which the purpose is to generate magical "currents," divine the future, effect material changes in the world, etc.; and therapeutic bestiality, as a cure for venereal and other diseases.
That in some cases magic, ritual, and therapy may have been rationalizations, mere devices for legitimising the otherwise forbidden, may be granted. But there is no basis for arguing that this was true in more than a small minority of the cases whereas there are many reasons for assuming that bestiality was in fact primarily a means to the desired supernatural or therapeutic end. Apart from the cases where bestiality is a means to a non-sexual end, we have already distinguished a variety of classes or types of individuals who at any given time may be found to be engaging in animal contacts, and who provide us with a multiplicity of motivations.
"Three conditions," wrote Havelock Ellis, "have favoured the extreme prevalence of bestiality: (1) primitive conceptions of life which built up no great barrier between man and other animals; (2) the extreme familiarity which necessarily exists between the peasant and his beasts, often combined with separation from women; (3) various folk-lore beliefs such as the efficacy of intercourse with animals as a cure for venereal diseases, etc." While we may wonder what Ellis meant by "extreme prevalence," the rest of the statement seems clear enough, and is all right as far as it goes.
That it does not, unfortunately, go far enough was the result of Ellis' belief that "... this offence is usually committed either by persons who are morbidly abnormal or who are of so low a degree of intelligence that they border on feeblemindedness."{24} Obviously, the majority of persons who have had some experience of bestiality do not fit either category, though, with some reservations about the near-feeblemindedness, the majority of *habitual* practitioners probably would. But by far the larger proportion of all those who have had one or more experiences of a sexual nature involving animals are neither abnormally feebleminded nor morbidly abnormal; they are, rather, normally sensual persons without strong inhibitions against such contacts who have found themselves in situations where desire coincided with opportunity for gratification by means of bestiality.
Ellis also neglected an important, though a minority, class, whose components include the jaded voluptuaries, the highly imaginative individuals for whom bestiality is an aesthetic as well as an erotic experience, the sexually amoral and curious individuals for whom the act may be said, without facetiousness, to serve an educational purpose, and so on.
Intellectually, persons making up a group of this kind are at the opposite extreme in many cases from the feebleminded peasant, and they are not necessarily abnormally morbid, or morbidly abnormal, either, unless one fallaciously infers that the mere fact of participation in the tabooed behaviour makes them so. Representatives of the same group will be found to be participant, at least occasionally, in most of the other more exotic sex practices, and some of the greatest names, especially the literary and artistic ones, of any given period will always be numbered among them.
If epithets are to be here applied, we ought perhaps to speak of such persons as "polymorphous perverse," or almost so, rather than merely sexually perverted.. Dubois-Desaulle correctly noted many years ago that bestiality need not be taken to imply sexual perversion: "Bestiality," he wrote, "does not always take its origin in psychopathological conditions. A complete absence of morality or an irresistible sexual impulse which cannot be satisfied naturally are sometimes the principal reasons for this satisfaction against nature that is met with among men and more rarely among women." (To which we must add that "complete absence of morality" is, of course, too strong, and that what should be understood, rather, is the absence of overwhelming moral inhibitions against this particular method of erotic gratification.)
A position more consistent with the contemporary spirit and thinking on this matter is taken by Dr. D. O. Cauldwell (Animal Contacts), who bases his remarks largely on the findings of Kinsey and others: "In former times," he writes, "sexual experiences between man and animal were regarded as a form of perversion on the part of man. More recent studies indicate that man, in having sexual relations with the lower animals, is merely pursuing basic biological instinct. Psychologists who have given the matter serious study from an unbiased point of view are of the opinion that the sexual urge and an outlet are of far more importance than the nature or form of the outlet. It is, therefore, the opinion of such psychologists that man's sexual experiences with the lower animals represent a diversion (because a more convenient outlet than the autoerotic is not at hand) rather than a perversion." (Italics mine.)
On the biological and only primitively psychological level, Cauldwell's view is a correct one. It does not, however take into account either the cases of true perversion, or those where the motivation is primarily intellectual, imaginative and aesthetic. Yet another aspect of this problem requires that we consider the possibility that the individual's practice of bestiality, while not a perversion, still stems from some pathological or otherwise abnormal conditions which are usually psychical or emotional but may sometimes be physical, as in a case mentioned by Bloch. It has been claimed that underdevelopment of the genitals may lead to indulgence in deviant behaviour, and a case of this kind which resulted in bestiality was described by Gyurkovechky.
Bloch, summarizing it, wrote that "To this category belongs the case ... of a young aristocrat with extraordinarily small genital, which made intercourse with women impossible for him, so that faute de mieux he practiced sodomy with a hen." Krafft-Ebing rightly noted, three-quarters of a century ago, certain pathological conditions which are sometimes present in individuals committing sexual acts with animals. Among these: Impotence for heterosexual coitus, and epilepsy, with impulsive performance of the animal contact. In addition, we may mention various forms of anxiety neurosis and religious and moral neuroses and psychoses, with profound conviction of the sinfulness of coitus, which, when accompanied by powerful sexual urges, may lead the victims to seek relief with animals and/or in other ways productive of less anxiety or less overwhelming feelings of guiltiness. In some of these cases, it is apparent, the bestial intercourse is no less faute de mieux than was that of Gyurkovechky's young aristocrat.
Equally apparently, the behaviour does not or need not constitute perverted bestiality. Krafft-Ebing was also correct in making the distinction between the occasional and the habitual practitioner of bestial intercourse. It is doubtless generally true, he wrote, that "Whoever seeks and finds sexual gratification exclusively with animals, although opportunities for the normal act are at hand, must be at once suspected of a pathological condition of the sexual instinct ... The zooerast (bestialist) as compared with the sexual invert (homosexual) is much farther removed from the normal object. With this latter point - that the exclusive bestialist or zoophile is much further removed from the normal object - it is quite possible to take issue.
Schwarz, paraphrased by M. Boss (Meaning and Content of Sexual Perversions) has put forward an extremely seminal and interesting view - which certainly has at least partial validity - "that the homosexual person never desires the body of the partner, that he (or she) only desires the partner's masculinity representing meaning or material." We are quite justified in wondering, especially if we accept the view of Schwarz, whether the zoophile, who "humanizes" his opposite-sex animal love-object, is truly "farther removed from the normal object" than the homosexual, whose object is invariably an abnormal one, and, if Schwarz is correct, is even further removed from the realm of the sexually normal by idealization at the expense - and obliteration - of the material aspect of the relationship as centred in the body of the Other.
Boss also mentions in his absorbing study of perversion theories the view of H. Kunz who, in his "anthropologic" theory of perversions suggests that among other criteria a sex act is to be regarded as perverted when the element of tenderness is excluded from it. Here we see at once, however, that in bestiality, on the contrary, the greatest amount of tenderness is to be found precisely where the behaviour is the most perverted - or at least the most "disturbed" - that is, in cases of true zoophilia where the animal sex-object is regarded in much the same manner as a beloved and therefore tenderly and passionately affective woman or man is regarded by the normal individual.
In concluding this brief and perforce largely speculative discussion of bestiality as a perversion, I am inclined to put forward the tentative view that human-animal sex contacts may be regarded as perverted only when the relationship is a zoophilic one; that is, only in cases where the animal is excessively "humanized," is a symbol and a personalized substitute for the human love-object denied the perverted individual by the very nature of his perversion. That much or all of the complex psychical mechanism by which this is brought about occurs on an unconscious or extra-conscious level is probably an invariable condition of the process.
To the extent that the zoophile's unconscious psychodynamics compel him to anthropomorphize or humanize or personalize the animal object of his affections, his conscious condition is an aberrant one, and it will determine the degree to which he departs from the "world of reality" into the world of his own delusions and fabrications, with the result that the increasingly bizarre and grotesque character of his perceptions and behaviour will be less and less obvious to him.
At length, though he may remain relatively normal in other respects (like the nobleman running with the pack of Great Danes and making love to his harlequin bitch, but otherwise displaying no notable eccentricities) he may be able, as did a young farmhand mentioned in the psychiatric literature, to fall in love with a cow on the consciously acknowledged basis of her beauty, her name, and the melodious tinkling of her cowbell, but perhaps be able to see very little or nothing out of the way in this behaviour.
The zooerast on the other hand, using the animal indifferently and as a substitute for heterosexual intercourse - a kind of masturbation - entertains neither illusions nor delusions and in no way, or at most very slightly, humanizes the animal sex-object or otherwise departs from or loosens his hold on the real world as experienced by him both apart from and inclusive of his sexual practice.
It is to be concluded from the discussion, even if one rejects much of the speculative and theoretical material presented, that, of the practitioners of bestial intercourse, only the zoophile may be regarded as perverted, and as "a medical problem." Thus, where the law is concerned, the ironic situation presents itself that the only true pervert in this field of endeavour is also the very one who deserves to escape the law's clutches via psychotherapy.
Society then has left at its disposal, for purposes of retribution, only the non-perverts, the transient bestialists who commit their offence only once or a few times at most, and who should thus be of least concern to a society concerned with avenging itself against perpetrators of that monstrous and corrupting crime against nature - coitus with animals.
RELATED PERVERSIONS
Of perversions related to bestiality we will attend briefly to two: sadistic torture of animals, and the usually innocuous, and rare, sexual practice which prescribes an animal role, achieved by the wearing of skins, furs, or hides, for one or both sex partners.
Sadists, when it results in any serious degree of injury to one or both parties of the act, are the most clear-cut example (along with masochists) of perverted sexuality. It inverts and mocks the very essence of the sexual act, which even above and beyond its procreative function is a means of giving and receiving pleasure, and a vehicle for the expression of love.
Alongside this phenomenon of sexual pleasure derived from inflicting pain and even death on another, sexual acts in which the beast is represented by persons wearing the skins of animals seem ludicrous and inconsequential indeed. Nonetheless, the existence of such a mode of erotic gratification raises many and interesting questions - so many and so interesting that volumes could be filled with speculation and data exploring the subject.
Sexual intercourse, usually between unclad females and males dressed in the skins of animals, is encountered among both civilized and primitive peoples. Among the latter - and perhaps among the former as an atavism - the practice is to be explained at least partially in terms of supernatural beings, werewolves, werefoxes, weretigers, and the like, which are symbolized or represented by an individual clad in the skin appropriate to the creature being symbolically invoked. However, it is likely that the element of bestiality, too, is in some degree present. The presence of fetishistic elements is also doubtless common, especially among the civilized participants in the practice.
Sexual relations between males and females both attired in the skins of animals appears to be, on the other hand, a "sophisticated perversion," found only among civilized peoples, which may possess both bestial and fetishistic (and other) components. This subject will not be further discussed here, but the interested reader will find considerably more light shed on the matter in Robert Eisler's book, Man Into Wolf. (Eisler, by the way, mentions two classical cases, at least one of them fictional, of men donning wolf pelts in order to have their way with desired females. A troubadour, Pierre Vidal, is said to have fallen in love with a woman known as La Louvre, the she-wolf, of Penaultier. Hoping to seduce her, he put on a wolf-skin, but the lady, unimpressed, set her dogs on him and drove him away. The other instance occurs in Longus' Daphnis and Chloe, in which a peeping tom shepherd in wolf's clothing attempts to rape Cloe.)
The mutilation and murder of animals for the purpose of achieving sadistic sexual gratification constitutes a sad and brutal page in the annals of humanity's erotic history. One of the practices most frequently described seems to have originated with the Chinese, though some say the Egyptians. Here, the bestialist sodomises a goose, strangling or decapitating it at the approach of his climax, so that the death convulsions of the bird will intensify the orgasm and other pleasure sensations of the sodomist. It has also been suggested that the decapitation is necessary in order to raise the dying fowl's body temperature, thus providing a further titillation.
Among the addicts of this revolting practice was Tipoo Sahib, the sultan and "Tiger" of Mysore, for many years the scourge of the British, and a sadist the equal in viciousness of any who ever lived. Crediting the Chinese with conceiving the technique, he delighted in sodomizing geese and cutting off or pulling off their heads as his climax approached. He was also given to copulation and buggery with sows and goats, and to defecating upon the bodies of captured British children, whom he then raped, mutilated, murdered, and violated necrophiliously.
According to De Sade, a variant of this bestial pleasure with the goose was to be found in the Parisian brothels of his day. Known as Avisodomy, it was accomplished, as described by the Marquis, in this way: " ... the girl holds the bird's (turkey's) neck locked between her thighs, you have her ass straight ahead of you for prospect, and she cuts the bird's throat the same moment you discharge." Another famous torturer of animals was Dmitri, son of Ivan the Cruel, who derived "unspeakable pleasure" from the death agonies of sheep, chickens, and geese.
Don Carlos, the son of Philip II of Spain, tortured both animals and little girls. He enjoyed watching the latter being whipped, and in the case of the former he would closet himself at night in the stables with horses, mutilating them with the dagger that was his constant companion. Impotent, sadistic, and insane, Don Carlos would doubtless have rivalled Nero or Heliogabalus for cruelty and depravity, had his premature death not prevented his accession to the Spanish throne. (Of Cesar Borgia, slayer of bulls by the dozen, I have spoken elsewhere.)
De Sade has described a reversal in which the beast is made the torturer of the human - also. In Siam, wrote the renowned scholar and champion of all vice, an adulteress is "delivered unto the elephant. A specially prepared contraption into which she is placed allows it to enjoy her in the belief it is a female elephant it is tuppering." Many instances of sexual sadism with animals, including such monstrous practices as ripping open the animal's belly and copulating with its still pulsing entrails, are described in the textbooks of Psychopathia Sexualis.
Everyone, however, is probably acquainted with cruel and sadistic mistreatment of animals, which is not quite so blatantly sexual but affords erotic and other gratifications nonetheless. The sexual bond that sometimes exists between the torturers and (human) tortured has been well established. In the case of the torture of animals, as with zoophilia there undoubtedly often takes place at least some measure of humanization or personalization of the animal which permits the sadist to experience, by means of this distortion, a pleasure akin to that which would be experienced were he inflicting pain upon a human victim linked to him by a sexual bond similar to that which unites torturer and tortured. If we do not suppose this to be the case, the torture and/or murder of the innocuous animal becomes either meaningless or vapid - the animal being of itself scarcely a proper vehicle for the expression of the sadist's self-hatred and hatred for others, which is usually or frequently part and parcel of his deviant sexuality.
The pleasure of the sadist is contingent, as Sartre has indicated, upon his experience of the Other as a freedom and a subjectivity - a freedom to be annihilated or enslaved, and a subjectivity to be objectified through pain. Only by means of the process of humanization or personalization may the animal be invested with the attributes essential to the metamorphosis the sadist strives to effect. George Ryley Scott (The History of Torture Thoughout the Ages) accurately makes the point that "It is important to distinguish between cruelty per se and sadism.
The popular assumption, due largely to the loose way in which the term is now used in popular fiction and in newspapers, that sadism is a synonym for cruelty in any form, is a fallacy. Sadism is a sexological term, and, strictly speaking, it should never be employed apart from its sexological connotations... "The sadist, in most cases, either practices or delights in the witnessing of cruelty, but his pleasure is concerned exclusively with and is limited entirely to sexual excitation and relief. Cruelty, in any other circumstances, does not appeal to him.
Moreover, the moment he sexual repercussion has spent itself, he takes no further interest in the practice or expression of cruelty. In addition, the sadist usually expresses his cruelty along well-defined and restricted lines." That all cruelty to animals, even where humanization of the animal is a psychological fact and motivation, is not sadism is obvious from Scott's remarks (with which I do not otherwise concur in every respect).
In any act of torture, murder, and lesser mistreatment of animals, we find that sadism may be, but is not necessarily, present. Just as sexual excitation and gratification may be experienced as a result of watching animals copulating, or by witnessing exhibitions of bestiality, so erotic rewards are available to some who witness the torture of animals (and the torture of humans). There can scarcely be a better popular example of this than the bullfight, where the so-called moment of truth is always for some the moment of orgasm or extreme sexual excitement.
Few "sports" (the aficianado prefers a loftier word) are so laden and dripping with sexuality as bullfighting, and a strong case could be made indeed that this phenomenon presents in almost equal proportion elements of both symbolically veiled bestiality and sadism. To test the conclusion that bullfighting is experienced erotically, and not just by a few, it is only necessary to observe the spectators, especially the female ones, who not infrequently display unmistakable signs of sexual excitation and even, in a few cases, at the "moment of truth," when the bull receives the sword's fatal thrust, the observable phenomena associated with orgasm.
One must visit a fundamentalist revival to encounter similar numbers of spectators responding in so obviously erotic a way to a spectacle supposed to afford stimulations and gratifications of quite another sort. (Observers have often noted the sexual excitation of females at various spectator events, and have assumed from this that women respond much more strongly to such stimuli than men. I think it is rather that women more readily display their erotic arousal by means of characteristic facial and other bodily reactions - an observation which may be confirmed by noting these mannerisms in fully aroused women engaged in coition.)
A number of cases have been reported of sexual arousal experienced as a result of watching animals being slaughtered at stockyards. Allied to this is the sadistic gratification sometimes obtained by means of dismembering animals (usually dead ones). It is a matter of clinical record that more than one butcher has been drawn to his "profession" by the fact that it presents the opportunity to experience gratification without risking the conflict with the law that would result from attempts to satisfy this particular predilection otherwise. Hunting, "training" of animals, their extermination at dog pounds, vivisection for scientific purposes, and in general any and all occupations and avocations where mutilation, killing, or the infliction of extreme pain are involved, may be only subterfuges employed by sadistic individuals exploiting animal victims for erotic gratification.
To this will be added only the observation that cruelty to animals where sadism is not a factor - that is, where there is no powerful impelling psychosexual drive for its own sake - is even more to be condemned than sadistically motivated cruelty, since it lacks the mitigating factor which must be considered in evaluating the sadist's offence.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
This rather brief discussion of bestiality may be thoroughly justified - if any justification is needed - on at least two counts: First, there is no widely accessible book or monograph in the English language which treats the subject even so thoroughly as I have treated it in this far from exhaustive survey; and second, so long as the sex statutes of this country (US, circa 1966) remain unaltered, in the face of all expert opinion as to their injustice and inadequacy, there are going to be victims of those statutes; and any work which is instrumental in illuminating a given sexual offence, and attempts to put it in its proper perspective as I have sought to do here with bestiality, is sufficiently justified on the basis of its good intentions alone. If it contributes to the education of the public, and hence to the more appropriate treatment of even a handful of offenders, then no one can question that the good intentions have been crowned with good results.
Scientific knowledge of human sexuality has increased immeasurably in the last century - especially in the last half century, under the impetus given the study of both normal and aberrant sexual phenomena by the work of the truly great Sigmund Freud, his colleagues and followers, and labourers in the fruitful vineyard of psychoanalysis generally. However, and as many persons still do not seem to recognize, the knowledge of the phenomena of sex acquired in recent times has by no means been provided exclusively by psychoanalysts. Psychoanalysis is identified in the public mind with investigations of sexuality, particularly of deviant sexuality, and it is true that psychoanalysis provided the decisive elan vital for such thoroughgoing investigations as we have seen in the last fifty years; but that should not be taken to mean that other sciences and areas of scholarship have not by now made their own extensive, significant, and influential contributions.
Psychology and psychiatry, along with anthropology, sociology, philosophy, various non-psychiatric branches of medicine, and law, have all made - along with still other disciplines - important studies and findings in the erotic realm. The result is that there now exists a vast body of knowledge in the area of human sexuality which is not yet complete or very well integrated, but still valuable and illuminating.
In view of this, it is not only distressing (tragic is doubtless the more appropriate word), but also most curious, to find that sex legislation in this country continues to be based upon unscientific, super naturalistic religio-ethical notions and no longer existing practicalities current at the time of Moses. The phenomenon is particularly curious when one is aware that within the legal profession, which is not as reactionary, stupid, and ill-informed (perhaps only less prolifically literary) in these matters as sexologists often assume - there is a widespread and perhaps almost general recognition of the inadequacy and inequity of contemporary legislation dealing with sexual behaviour and powerful sentiment in behalf of statutory revisions to conform more nearly with the realities of the present-day situation where sexual knowledge, beliefs, and behaviour are concerned.
Even though attorneys, judges, and professors of jurisprudence are not lacking in appreciation in of the irrationality, barbarism, and absurdity of the American sex statutes, the ground for criticism remains that the statutes continue to exist. Moreover, impetus to reforms that may be called effective has come not, in the main, from those concerned professionally with the law and with law-making and legal reform, who might have been expected to provide such leadership, but from workers in the sciences who have had not only to provide the requisite knowledge, but have tackled the almost job of re-educating the public in sexological matters as well. Some will feel, indeed, that the very fact that the legal profession is not lacking in an understanding of the inequities of contemporary sex legislation places that profession in an even worse light than would be the case were its members merely ignorant.
The American Law Institute's proposal Model Penal Code, which seeks to bring United States legislation more nearly into line with the comparatively French Code Penal, is an example of just this kind of juristic awareness on the one hand, and impotence on the other. Modern jurists recognize the principle that sexual acts between adults, which are private and take place by mutual consent, should be excluded from statutory consideration; but apart from drawing up recommendations, to be perused and praised by fellow attorneys and academicians of other disciplines, they do little to implement their own findings - the best method of implementation being, of course, the introduction and wholehearted backing of genuinely remedial legislation.
In defence of the ineffectuality and velleity characteristic of attorneys and legislators where sex laws are concerned, it is argued that the public will not support any liberalization of the statutes, and corrective legislation is not introduced and/or supported because, as Morris Ploscowe has put it, "of the fear that a vote for repeal would be branded as a vote for immorality."
Whether the legal profession, and the legislative representatives of the people, are here offering a valid defence is for the reader to decide. However, we have recently seen expressed, most notably in the U. S. Supreme court's desegregation decisions, the philosophy that it is up to legal and legislative leaders to lead, and this whether the masses of the people wish to be led or not - the prerequisite being that the direction taken should be towards, and not away from, a position consistent with contemporary notions of what is moral, just, and socially realistic.
Whether they would wipe most of the sex "offences" from the statute books altogether, or punish masturbators by burning them alive and strewing their odious ashes to the winds, the typical attorney and judge are likely to be painfully aware of the need for uniform sex legislation which will end once and forever the idiocy that what is no offence at all, or only a misdemeanour, in one jurisdiction, is a heinous crime warranting the most severe retributions in another, and perhaps adjoining jurisdiction.
For example, fornication is punished in Virginia with a twenty-dollar fine while the same offence committed in Arizona may result in a three-year prison term. Two other states, North Dakota and Rhode Island, penalize fornicators and fornicatresses with thirty-day jail sentences (North Dakota) and ten-dollar fines (Rhode Island). Homosexuality, a misdemeanour in New York when the relationship is between consenting adults, can send both parties to prison for the rest of their lives in Nevada. Penalties for prostitution may vary, in the various states from fines or brief jail sentences to five-year prison terms. Age of consent ranges from twelve years in some states to the ludicrous extreme of twenty-one years in another.Intercourse with an underage female may or may not be rape, depending on where it occurs, when the girl in question is a sexually mature prostitute who has actively solicited the intercourse. And so on.
To suppose that such a travesty upon judicial logic and common sense as this hodgepodge of conflicting legislation represents is the will of the people, is probably to underestimate the intelligence of the public - a feat rarely accomplished by lawmakers or anyone else outside of the film and television industries.
Legislators in a position to do something about sex laws, and the legal profession generally, have been too long fearful of the noisy pressures of a minority which no longer speaks for the people - if it ever did. To propose and support remedial sex legislation of a liberalized variety is to incite a highly vociferous and vicious rabble of fundamentalist preachers and other neurotics, psychotics, and demagogues who are always looking for just such an opportunity to win headlines for themselves and inflame the emotions of their followers. But the political power of such spokesmen for the illiterate rabble - who readily accuse of seeking to legitimise vice any spokesman for the liberal sex-legalistic viewpoint - is certainly disproportionate to their public influence generally.
Against them, though lawmakers seem never to have noticed, is thrown not only the politically negligible weight of the intellectual and scientific communities, but also the weight of the larger and more powerful churches, which are the bitter foes of radical fundamentalism and which have, in many cases, already gone on record as being aware that contemporary restraints of a legal kind upon human sexuality are unrealistic and generally unenforceable. Unfortunately, since they no longer believe it quite proper to lift their voices, the hysterical screams and shouts and strident screeching of the fanatics often drown the larger and more intelligent religious groups out.
However, that does not at all mean that the rabble-rousers and their followers control anything like a majority of votes, as seems often to be assumed. What it does mean, and this has long been true, is that a minority of anachronistic (and atavistic) ethical and theological cultists, by dint of sheer lung power and uninhibited vituperation, have imposed upon the majority of non-fundamentalists a dictatorship of the ignorant in the area of official sexual morality as reflected in antisexual legislation.
The majority of Americans have for some time now been prepared for statutory revisions, but are often cowed, as are so many legislators, judges and attorneys, by the outcries of the demagogues, so that they are hesitant to make their views publicly known. One can thus ponder with sadness and wonder a situation wherein a noisy minority is permitted to endure as the arbiter of official sexual morality by a majority, which could overturn the minority rule at any time, if only it could find the necessary courage and initiative to undertake the effort.
The foregoing should not be taken to imply of course that the majority of Americans - especially the majority of church-going Americans - are in favour of condoning sexual promiscuity or other transgressions against the old Biblical codes. Rather, what is suggested is that a probably significant majority of spokesmen for the more responsible religious and juristic viewpoints are now prepared to make the distinction, which should have been made long ago, between sins on the one hand, and crimes on the other; and that if this leadership were vigorously exerted, a sizable majority of all Americans would almost certainly go along with some sane legislative changes, especially in the direction of uniformity, but even in the direction of liberalization consistent with reality.
What is needed, obviously - though doubtless it will be necessary in the beginning to settle for something less - is to eliminate the whole notion of "sex crimes," placing actual crimes against persons, such as rape and child-molesting, under other more appropriate headings, and eliminating from statutory consideration altogether such matters as (adult) homosexuality and the various sexual practices of men and women, such as fellatio, cunnilingus, and anal intercourse, presently punishable as felonies even when occurring between husband and wife. If it is too often impossible to obtain justice where behaviour labelled "sex offence" is concerned.
The whole area of sex is so beclouded by emotions, superstitions, and puerilities as to preclude the possibility of rational approach. While placing rape, child molesting, and other offences against persons under other headings would not eliminate prejudice altogether, at least it would be helpful in procuring a somewhat more dispassionate climate both of general opinion and in the courtroom. In addition to abolishing the concept of "sex crimes" as a special class of offences unto themselves, great care should be taken to avoid terminology which, by its very nature, generates emotionality and thus makes impossible the objectivity essential to reasoned consideration of the facts in any given case if justice is to result. Such terminology as "crimes against nature," which is not only emotion generating but scientifically inaccurate as well, should be barred from all statutes and from the courtroom deliberations.
Similarly, any semantical revision should prohibit the use of such words as "pervert," "perverted," "sex fiend," and others which, it is clear, tend to interpose blind emotivity between the facts and the reasoning processes of those who must try to evaluate them. The abolition of the whole concept of "sex offences" may seem to some too sweeping a measure, but it is demonstrably evident that nothing less will now suffice to eradicate the evils arising out of superstition, misconception, and hysteria engendered by the sex offender witch hunt of recent times. The alternative is to persist in the repugnant present practice of a scapegoat prosecutions and wholesale hypocrisy where a few unfortunates too often suffer, cast up as offerings to the prejudice of our forbears, in order that society may seem to prohibit what is generally practice or may be permitted to be practiced without the slightest detriment to the social structure.
Returning to bestiality in particular, the word "silly" has often been employed to describe the offence of the exhibitionist - indicating that it is a minor one and not to be taken seriously - and it would be both well and just were bestiality also to be regarded in the vast majority of cases as at worst merely "silly." Instead, it is commonly considered, even by some "experts" who ought to know better, along with such "extreme acts" as necrophilia and coprophilia - both behaviours usually indicative, as bestiality usually is not, of serious mental disturbance.
The philosopher Immanuel Kant, who seems to have died a virgin at eighty, once argued that, on the principle of jus talionis, persons engaging in bestiality should be cast out of human society and deprived of all rights commonly accorded human beings. In effect, after other vengeance has previously been exacted, that is just about what happens to the convicted bestialist in contemporary American communities.
Philip Roche (The Criminal Mind) has suggested that the present-day fear and pursuit of the sex offender is analogous to the witchcraft persecutions of the past, and in the case of bestiality (and of some other deviations as well) it is by no means rare that one encounters hate, hysteria, and other emotional aberrations which must be quite similar to those encountered in the climate of the witchcraft epidemic of a few centuries ago. We are wont to congratulate ourselves that the witch-hunt is over, or at least that it flares up only infrequently, but it would seem that self-congratulations are premature.
NOTES
1. According to the Hindus, the Romans, and the Greeks, masturbation was rather a gift of the gods - Krishna, Hermes, and Mercury, respectively, to be precise - and these deities could best, therefore, be worshiped by means of ritual manustuprations. Homosexuality, on the other hand, was given to mankind by the demigod Orpheus, and both he and other deities are patrons and patronesses of tribades, fellators, pedicators, and other homosexuals and may be worshiped accordingly. All this, however, would not have been of much assistance to prehistoric man who, in addition to his intellectual handicaps, had no goda, and therefore was faced with the necessity of inventing sodomy, masturbation, etc., on his own. In the case of masturbation, it most likely came into being when men and women itched, and scratched (or possibly, where the male is concerned, when he was moved by curiosity to investigate the phenomenon of his organ's erection, conducting the exploration vigorously enough to acquire the key to the mystery. At this point, man's fate as the master of this world and the species nearest to the angels must have hung precariously in the balance. Suppose (being ignorant of the link between copulation and procreation) he had preferred masturbation, on the ground that it could be accomplished at any time, any place without requiring the co-operation of another person? Fortunately he did not, and a potentially grave menace to the survival of mankind was circumvented thanks to the superior raptures of coition.)
2. The Egyptian belief in metempsychosis was another favourable factor. Where there is belief in metempsychosis, or "transmigration of souls," with the notion that any or every animal may be a former human repeating the interminable cycle of alternating between human and animal forms, there will certainly be less resistance to bestiality, especially on the ground that by engaging in intercourse with a beast a man or woman is descending to the bestial level and thus degrading the human spirit. (C: in other words, not degrading by "descending to the bestial level" but instead spending time with another human soul, located in an animal.)
3. Some authorities hold that Herodotus (and writers after him) erred in describing the sacred animal of Mendes as a goat - which it was, in fact, a ram. If this is correct, ritual magic includes a good many cases of females assaulted by he-goats who ought, instead, to have been embraced by rams. Whether they (or their magic) lost or gained by this historical error - if it was that - I cannot say. The ram, incidentally, was a favoured animal form of the god Osiris, who also appeared at times in the form of a bull (Onuphis) and at other times in that of a bird (Bennu). The god Khnum, who was a fecundity deity, also, assumed Ram form, and goat form.
4. Lewinsohn. (A History of Sexual Customs) reminds us that there was also another Europa, unravished though much trod, an Athenian prostitute celebrated and immortalized in an epigram by Antipater: "Six obols will buy you Europa, the beauty of Athens; Never reluctant or cross, nothing whatever to fear; Bed as clean as can be, and properly heated in winter; This one won't ask you, Zeus, to turn yourself into a bull!"
5. Although dogs are the most common bestial lovers of women, and doubtless have always been, I am not aware of a single instance where one of the Greek gods appeared to a woman as a dog. Indeed, the dog was in mysteriously evil repute among the Greeks, leading Simonides of Amorgos, and later Phocylides, to declare that certain types of repulsive and ill-natured human females descended from bitches. This is apparently the origin of the still-current epithet "bitch" as used to describe objectionable females. (Cf. Lewinsohn, Animals, Men and Myths.) The Romans, one should add, did not hold this bias to the same extent, and copulations of roman women with dogs were frequent. As always, prostitutes favoured dogs: "Jeanette shall visit you, her bitch-pup accompanying her; complacent is the hound to its mistress, the lady complacent to men." - (Panormita)
6. Bryk is quoted by Niemoller in his booklet, Bestiality in Ancient and Modern Times.
7. Widely believed to have sold his soul to the Devil, John XII (pope, 954-964) was distinguished additionally for his blasphemies and his many erotic escapades. The Roman Synod of 963, convoked by the Emperor Otto and composed of cardinals and bishops, charged the Pope with assassination, perjury, profanation of churches, incest with his parents and with his sisters, the proposing of drunken toasts to the Grand Master of Hell, and invocations of demons and pagan gods and goddesses, including of course, Venus. John's successor, Leo VIII, is also said to have died of a paralytic stroke while copulating.
8. In U.S. vs. Level, tried by General Court Martial at Oxford, England, it was charged that the defendant violated the 96th Article of War in that on or about October 10, 1944, he committed the crime against nature by wrongfully and unlawfully having carnal copulation with a fowl. The defendant made a plea of not guilty, but was convicted and sentenced to dishonourable discharge and two years at hard labour. The Board of Review held that the evidence was adequate to support the inference that the accused effected penetration of a chicken. One Malone - U.S. vs. Malone, General Court Martial, Ipswich, England, September 8, 1943 - was convicted of sodomy with a cow and sentenced to dishonourable discharge and three years at hard labour. Malone's apprehension came about, according to evidence presented at the trial, when a British farmer saw him chasing a cow through the dusk and alerted police. The law enforcement officials, arriving after dark, testified that they saw, transfixed by their automobile headlamps, a man mounted on a cow, in a position to have illicit sexual relations with it. They then descended upon the zooerast, who was overtaken while in an unclad condition, carrying his clothing and his shoes in his hand. It was testified that when apprehended he was drinking but not drunk, though admitted by stipulation was medical evidence that he was found to be intoxicated to an extent impairing his mental powers, and that his penis was erected and tainted with cow manure, while his hands were also incriminatingly crusted with dung. The crux of the defence in this case seems to have been that penetration of the cow was not proved since it was not actually witnessed. The farmer could not, in the gathering darkness, see clearly enough to be certain of the penetration, while the police apparently so frightened the defendant that he at once dismounted and took to flight. However the constables testified that the hindquarters of the cow were imprinted on Malone's thighs, and it was held - finally by the Board of Review - that the evidence was sufficient to sustain the conviction. U.S. vs. Ricardo Sanchez, Private, U.S. Army, is unusual in that the defendant was accused both of indecent acts with a fowl ("penetrating the chicken's rectum with his penis with intent to gratify his lust") and lewd and indecent acts with a three-year-old female child. It is quite rare (psychotics and mental defectives apart) that the individual guilty of bestiality is a perpetrator of other sex offences also. On February 2, 1960, the Court of Military Appeals affirmed the conviction of Sanchez, for the offences committed by him at Landstuhl, Germany in 1957, upholding the sentence of dishonourable discharge and three years' confinement (reduced from five). One of the judges, interestingly and most vigorously, made the point that while moral behaviour generally is a private matter, the conduct of Sanchez had been such "as to bring discredit upon the service, and it would be an affront to ordinary decency to hold that an act such as the one here committed was not criminal per se and would not dishonour the service in the eyes of a civilized society."
9. There is no end to Catholic wonders where bestiality is concerned, and in the Church the "Holy Lamb" was sometimes the object of unusual - and perhaps less than completely spiritual - affections. Some of the female saints, as history has amply recorded, aspired to the closest possible relationship with the Almighty. Thus, Veronica Juliani had herself married to the Holy Lamb and then took a real lamb to bed with her to suckle her breasts, even managing to produce a few drops of (miraculous) milk from her nipples, though technically a virgin. Presumably, marriage to a Holy Lamb, even when this included unusual intimacy with a quite fleshly one, did not constitute bestiality or require subsequent penance. It may also be mentioned that Jeanne de Cambray and Angelina de Foligny went further yet, claiming to have had actual sex relations with the Deity. Who had appeared to - or unto - them. Saint Mechtildis made a similar claim, saying: "He kissed my hand, pressed me to Him, whispered to me to give Him my love, and I surrendered my all to Him and in return tasted of His divine essence."
10. Extremely interesting subject matter related to bestiality in occultism may be found by the discerning reader in William Seabrook's volumes The Magic Island and Witchcraft, Its Power in the World Today
11. Pierre Burgot, burned alive as a werewolf following trial by Dominicans of the diocese of Besancon in 1521, claimed repeatedly and unwaveringly, under torture, to have had sexual relations with actual wolves while himself in wolf form. It is quite possible that he did, in the same manner as the witches copulated with the Devil; that is, in hallucinations, dreams, fantasies, etc., which afterwards seemed just as real as any physical act might have. In China, there was long a belief in werefoxes, which seem to be allied to the incubi and succubae of the West. The male werefox mated with human females, and the female werefox with human males. They were said to appear to their human consorts in either fox or human form, and when they appeared in the latter guise, their fox form would become visible if they went to sleep or if they drank too much, which they often did, being notorious tipplers inordinately devoted to wine and other spirituous beverages. A variant of the idea of humans transforming themselves into animals to have sexual relations with humans was found in Baluchistan where black bears were said to sometimes turn at night into women of great beauty, and to solicit the embraces of men who were sometimes hugged to death during the frenzy of the coition.
12. Some versions hold that to accomplish her initial seduction of Enkidu the prostitute is forced to put on the skins of wild beasts - a lion's skin or a wild dog's skin or both - perhaps so as to ease the transition from bestial to human intercourse.
13. That Enkidu is cured of his bestiality by virtue of the more excellent and ecstatic qualities of intercourse with a human female is the interpretation placed upon this incident by most classical erotologists. However, another interpretation is at least equally plausible in the light of some versions of the epic: Once Enkidu has had intercourse with the woman, he is rejected by the animals who want no more to do with him. The animals reject that Enkidu, rather than the other way 'round, is of course the view least flattering to humanity, which may account for the preference shown the coital cure version by the scholars.
14. As for royalty and nobility descending from bestial intercourse, Emperor Henry VII himself claimed to have descended from the union of Raymond, son of the Count de la Foret, with Melusina, whose body was half that of a fish or of a serpent. Indeed, after Melusina's story became well known, there were numerous competitors for the distinction of having descended from her - including the famous families of Luxembourg, Rohan, and Sassenaye.
15. The newspapers quite often report authenticated cases of dogs dying at the graveside of a deceased master or mistress, or wasting away and dying, refusing all food and consolation, etc, after their owner's death. A famous historic case, which cannot, however, be said to enjoy the status of "beyond doubt," is that of the famous German soldier, physician, and Magus, Henry Cornelius Agrippa von Nertesheim (1486-1535). Wherever Agrippa went, he was accompanied by a huge black dog, which was reputed to be, variously, the Devil, Agrippa's familiar, or his succubus. At any rate, upon Agrippa's death, as has been often told, the dog hastened from the chamber where its master had just breathed his last and flung itself into the river, where it died by drowning.
16. The founder of the Turkish nation, Suleiman Shah, was said to have married the she-wolf, which rescued and raised him after he was abandoned as an infant and left in the wilderness to die. Presumably, it was the head of this wolf that he had emblazoned on his banners. There is said to be a form of insanity - the therianthropic delusion - in which individuals may not only be enamoured of animal love-objects but believe themselves to have been transformed into animals, and seek out the company of "their own kind." It was apparently this therianthropic delusion which fell upon King Nebuchadnezzar, who is said to have lived among oxen, grazing on the pastures, "... till his hairs were grown like eagles' and his nails like birds'..." It is also recorded that the daughters of King Proitos of Argos lived among cows, wandering over the countryside stark naked, believing themselves to have been transformed into bovines. According to Hesiod, their "madness" was nymphomania, and they were enamoured, like Pasiphae, of bulls. It is said that their psychosis infected ultimately all the women of Argos.
17. I cannot, regrettably, lay claim to having interviewed a great many persons experienced in bestiality, but I have been fortunate enough to interview at considerable length, and in some depth, a few persons so experienced. These subjects, it should be added, were none of them zoophiles, but belong rather to that class of bestialists who, having no strong inhibitions or moral convictions preventing such contacts, might be called also sexual experimentalists - persons who, out of curiosity, or for want of a human sex partner at a time of sexual arousal, have engaged in erotic relations with animals. Apart from these few persons (both males and females), I have interviewed or talked with - much less satisfactorily from the standpoint of information received - a small number of males who had intercourse with animals on one or more occasions while "boys," but who did not admit to any adult animal contacts. My remarks on the reactions of animals to bestial intercourse are based almost entirely upon these two groups of interviews, as are my remarks on the techniques and methods employed by humans to seduce animals and prepare them for acts of bestiality. My remarks on the psychology of humans in bestial relationships are, on the other hand, based to a much greater extent on views of other writers which my findings have tended to confirm. Unfortunately, none of these matters have been dealt with in any detail by competent authors (with whose work I am familiar), and one is obliged for the most part to speculate and guess in order to fill in the gaps left both by previous authors and the subjects interviewed. My conclusions are therefore at best fragmentary and tentative, which is why I have not attempted a more thoroughgoing analytic presentation, but even so are probably the most complete available to the reader at the present time.
18. Fantasies of bestial intercourse, quite possibly indicating a desire for bestial intercourse, are encountered with considerable frequency among prostitutes, where the bestiality would doubtless serve a purpose made clear in the pages of the essay on Negro sexuality (another section of the book...), which follows; that they also occur with frequency among non-prostitutes, where the function of the fantasy is similar, is quite likely. It is very interesting to remark how often the mention of intercourse with animals crops up in prostitutes' conversations and in their dreams and day-dreams, which are revealed only to the analytic probe, so that one cannot say that the animal is merely a device for spicing up the language, or a figure of speech used to make a point having nothing to do with bestiality. For example, Carla C., a call girl, told the psychoanalyst Greenwald (The Call Girl): "Black, white, what difference does it make? I'd screw a zebra for fifty dollars; and anything new they can invent I'm all for." Another call girl, Beverly, confessed to Greenwald that her erotic fantasies consisted of having sex with animals; namely, apes, gorillas, etc. Carla C.'s typical statement is echoed by Rita Marlowe, another prostitute, who told sociologist Sara Harris (They Sell Sex): "Hell, I'd love an elephant up if there was enough loot in it."
19. Since the above was written I have learned that on June 6, 1662, at New Haven, a man named Potter was executed - along with a cow, two heifers, three sheep and two sows - for the crime of bestiality. It therefore seems probable that it was to Potter, rather than to Weir, that Cotton Mather made reference.
20. In at least some cases of true (zoophilic) perversion, the sexual dreams of the subject will consist largely or entirely of dreams about bestial intercourse (as the true homosexual will dream about homoerotic intercourse, etc.). A number of confirming cases have come to my attention.
21. Ernest Jones, Freud's biographer and an analyst worthy of attention in his own right, has observed (On the Nighmare): "... Doubtless the feature of animals that most attracts a personal interest of untutored minds is the freedom they display in openly satisfying needs, particularly those of a sexual and excremental order, which with human beings have often to be restrained; in fact, the expression 'animal passions' is generally employed to denote sexual impulses. Children often owe their first experience of sexual activities to the sight of animal copulation, and every psychoanalyst knows how important the influence of this can be. Animals therefore lend themselves to the indirect representation of crude and unbridled wishes. Analytical experience has shown that the occurrence of animals in a dream regularly indicates a sexual theme, usually an incest one, a typical example being the maiden's dream of being pursued or attacked by rough animals." While animals usually represent humans in dreams, or may be genital symbols or refer to undirected libido, and while desires aroused by the activities of animals are usually desires for sexual relations with humans of the opposite sex, it is also true that these experiences may create a desire to engage in bestiality, especially when a human sex partner is not available. On the most obvious level, persons caught flagrante delicto with animals have stated that their erotic passion was aroused by watching the animal in question in sex intercourse with or, less commonly, in masturbation or in a state of obvious sexual arousal.
22. Cesare Borgia, son of Pope Alexander VI and brother of Lucrezia was also dedicated to the exploitation of animals for his pleasures, but in a somewhat different, though perhaps related, way. Cesare, it is recorded, would order bulls, in lots of a dozen, brought into a Vatican courtyard where he would amuse himself by spearing them to death. Any analysis of this pastime is perhaps complicated by the fact that the bull appeared on the Borgia coat of arms. Cesare, it may be added, was his father's own son when it came to lubricity. Both Alexander and Cesare fornicated incestuously with Lucrezia, and father and son were equally noted for their orgies with prostitutes.
23. The sixteenth century French eroticist Brantome, apparently voicing a belief prevalent in his time, wrote that "Weasels are touched with this (lesbian, or female homosexual) sort of love, and delight female with female to unite and dwell together. And so in hieroglyphic signs, women loving one another with this kind of affection were represented of yore by weasels. I have heard tell of a lady which was used always to keep some of these animals, for that she had dealings with this mode of love and so did take pleasure in watching her little pets in their intercourse together." The Kronhausens, who quote this passage, remark that it is the only story of homosexual animal intercourse for exhibitionistic purposes related in a work of "erotic realism" that has come to their attention. I am familiar with gossip concerning a famous trainer of animals, who is said to have induced both male canines and male rats to perform homosexually for exhibitionistic purposes, but of course gossip is not a work of erotic realism, and I must concur with the Kronhausens' verdict that Brantome's story seems to be unique.
24. Professor Tarnowski (Pederasty in Europe), after Mierzejewski (Forensische Gynaekologie), asserted that imbeciles evidence an unnatural tendency to intercourse with animals. This is probably one of those "clinical observations" derived from moralistic wishful thinking which permeated medical literature dealing with the perversions until fairly recently (and is not altogether unknown today). In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there was something amounting almost to a general medical conspiracy to make bestiality a "vice of clodhoppers" and mental defectives, and when it was asserted that imbeciles are much given to bestiality, one could be rather certain that soon someone else would be saying that most bestialists are imbeciles or near-imbeciles. Additional note. Time magazine (February 3, 1961) reviewed Story of Icarus, by Ernst Schnabel, a work I have not read. According to Time's reviewer, the book is "a mythological novel about Queen Pasiphae's untidy love affair with the great white bull of Crete." The reviewer remarks that "Although the ancient Greeks were seldom squeamish about aberrant sex, even they recoiled from this particular caper...." - an insupportable observation. We are further told that in the novel Daedalus denies "the construction of a cunningly made wooden cow in which Pasiphae concealed herself to approach the bull." It is of course Mr. Schnabel's privilege as a fictionist to spare Daedalus his historic role as Pasiphae's confederate in iniquity. We are living, after all, in the time of the universal whitewash (national heroes - who are rather black washed - always excepted).