by Hall.  Among Mahommedans the sexual organs are sometimes habitually exposed by religious penitents, and I note that Bernhard Stern, in his book on the medical and sexual aspects of life in Turkey, referring to a penitent of this sort whom he saw on the Stamboul bridge at Constantinople, remarks that the organ was very largely developed.  It may well be in such a case that the penitent’s religious attitude is reinforced by some lingering relic of a more fleshly ostentation.

It is by a pseudo-atavism that this phallicism is evoked in the exhibitionist.  There is no true emergence of an ancestrally inherited instinct, but by the paralysis or inhibition of the finer and higher feelings current in civilization, the exhibitionist is placed on the same mental level as the man of a more primitive age, and he thus presents the basis on which the impulses belonging to a higher culture may naturally take root and develop.

Reference may here be made to a form of primitive exhibitionism, almost confined to women, which, although certainly symbolic, is absolutely non-sexual, and must not, therefore, be confused with the phenomena we are here occupied with.  I refer to the exhibition of the buttocks as a mark of contempt.  In its most primitive form, no doubt, this exhibitionism is a kind of exorcism, a method of putting evil spirits, primarily, and secondarily evil-disposed persons, to flight.  It is the most effective way for a woman to display sexual centers, and it shares in the magical virtues which all unveiling of the sexual centers is believed by primitive peoples to possess.  It is recorded that the women of some peoples in the Balkan peninsula formerly used this gesture against enemies in battle.  In the sixteenth century so distinguished a theologian as Luther when assailed by the Evil One at night was able to put the adversary to flight by protruding his uncovered buttocks from the bed.  But the spiritual significance of this attitude is lost with the decay of primitive beliefs.  It survives, but merely as a gesture of insult.  The symbolism comes to have reference to the nates as the excretory focus, the seat of the anus.  In any case it ignores any sexual attractiveness in this part of the body.  Exhibitionism of this kind, therefore, can scarcely arise in persons of any sensitiveness or aesthetic perception, even putting aside the question of modesty, and there seems to be little trace of it in classic antiquity when the nates were regarded as objects of beauty.  Among the Egyptians, however, we gather from Herodotus (Bk.  II, Chapter LX) that at a certain popular religious festival men and women would go in boats on the Nile, singing and playing, and when they approached a town the women on the boats would insult the women of the town by injurious language and by exposing themselves.  Among the Arabs, however, the specific gesture we are concerned with is noted, and a man to whom vengeance is forbidden would express his feelings