the abnormal has appeared to be specially close to the secret Power of the World.  Abnormal persons are themselves of the same opinion and regard themselves as divine.  As Horneffer points out, they often really possess special aptitude.[52] Karsch in his Gleichgeschlechtliche Leben der Naturvoelker (1911) has brought out the high religious as well as social significance of castes of cross-dressed and often homosexual persons among primitive peoples.  At the same time Edward Carpenter in his remarkable book, Intermediate Types among Primitive Folk (1914), has shown with much insight how it comes about that there is an organic connection between the homosexual temperament and unusual psychic or divinatory powers.  Homosexual men were non-warlike and homosexual women non-domestic, so that their energies sought different outlets from those of ordinary men and women; they became the initiators of new activities.  Thus it is that from among them would in some degree issue not only inventors and craftsmen and teachers, but sorcerers and diviners, medicine-men and wizards, prophets and priests.  Such persons would be especially impelled to thought, because they would realize that they were different from other people; treated with reverence by some and with contempt by others, they would be compelled to face the problems of their own nature and, indirectly, the problems of the world generally.  Moreover, Carpenter points out, persons in whom the masculine and feminine temperaments were combined would in many cases be persons of intuition and complex mind beyond their fellows, and so able to exercise divination and prophecy in a very real and natural sense.[53]

This aptitude of the invert for primitive religion, for sorcery and divination, would have its reaction on popular feeling, more especially when magic and the primitive forms of religion began to fall into disrepute.  The invert would be regarded as the sorcerer of a false and evil religion and be submerged in the same ignominy.  This point has been emphasized by Westermarck in the instructive chapter on homosexuality in his great work on Moral Ideas.[54] He points out the significance of the fact, at the first glance apparently inexplicable, that homosexuality in the general opinion of medieval Christianity was constantly associated, even confounded, with heresy, as we see significantly illustrated by the fact that in France and England the popular designation for homosexuality is derived from the Bulgarian heretics.  It was, Westermarck believes, chiefly as a heresy and out of religious zeal that homosexuality was so violently reprobated and so ferociously punished.

In modern Europe we find the strongest evidence of the presence of what may fairly be called true sexual inversion when we investigate the men of the Renaissance.  The intellectual independence of those days and the influence of antiquity seem to have liberated and fully developed the impulses of those abnormal individuals who would otherwise have found no clear expression, and passed unnoticed.[55]