Neri, again (Archivio delle Psicopatie Sessuali, vol. i, fasc. 7 and 8, 1896), records the case of an Italian masochist who experienced the greatest pleasure when both urination and defecation were practiced in this manner by the woman he was attached to.

In a previous volume of these Studies ("Sexual Inversion,” History XXVI) I have recorded the masochistic day-dreams of a boy whose impulses were at the same time inverted; in his reveries “the central fact,” he states, “became the discharge of urine from my lover over my body and limbs, or, if I were very fond of him, I let it be in my face.”  In actual life the act of urination casually witnessed in childhood became the symbol, even the reality, of the central secret of sex:  “I stood rooted and flushing with downcast eyes till the act was over, and was conscious for a considerable time of stammering speech and bewildered faculties....  I was overwhelmed with emotion and could barely drag my feet from the spot or my eyes from the damp herbage where he had deposited the waters of secrecy.  Even to-day I cannot dissociate myself from the shuddering charm that moment had for me.”

It is not only the urine and the faeces which may thus acquire a symbolic fascination and attractiveness under the influence of masochistic deviations of sexual idealization.  In some cases extreme rapture has been experienced in licking sweating feet.  There is, indeed, no excretion or product of the body which has not been a source of ecstasy:  the sweat from every part of the body, the saliva and menstrual fluid, even the wax from the ears.

Krafft-Ebing very truly points out (Psychopathia Sexualis, English translation, p. 178) that this sexual scatalogic symbolism is precisely paralleled by a religious scatalogic symbolism.  In the excesses of devout enthusiasm the ascetic performs exactly the same acts as are performed in these excesses of erotic enthusiasm.  To mix excreta with the food, to lick up excrement, to suck festering sores—­all these and the like are acts which holy and venerated women have performed.

Not only the saint, but also the prophet and medicine-man have been frequently eaters of human excrement; it is only necessary to refer to the instance of the prophet Ezekiel, who declared that he was commanded to bake his bread with human dung, and to the practices of medicine-men at Torres Straits, in whose training the eating of human excrement takes a recognized part.  (Deities, notably Baal-Phegor, were sometimes supposed to eat excrement, so that it was natural that their messengers and representatives among men should do so.  As regards Baal-Phegor, see Dulaure, Des Divinites Generatrices, Chapter IV, and J.G.  Bourke, Scatalogic Rites of All Nations, p. 241.  See also Ezekiel, Chapter IV, v. 12, and Reports Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, vol. v, p. 321.)