All things from Jove descend
          Jove was a male, Jove was a deathless bride;
          For men call Air, of two fold sex, the Jove.

Julius Pirmicus relates that “The Assyrians and part of the Africians” (along the Mediterranean seaboard?) “hold Air to be the chief element and adore its fanciful figure (imaginata figura), consecrated under the name of Juno or the Virgin Venus. * * * Their companies of priests cannot duly serve her unless they effeminate their faces, smooth their skins and disgrace their masculine sex by feminine ornaments.  You may see men in their very temples amid general groans enduring miserable dalliance and becoming passives like women (viros muliebria pati), and they expose, with boasting and ostentation, the pollution of the impure and immodest body.”  Here we find the religious significance of eunuchry.  It was practiced as a religious rite by the Tympanotribas or Gallus,[FN#388] the castrated votary of Rhea or Bona Mater, in Phrygia called Cybele, self mutilated but not in memory of Atys; and by a host of other creeds:  even Christianity, as sundry texts show,[FN#389] could not altogether cast out the old possession.  Here too we have an explanation of Sotadic love in its second stage, when it became, like cannibalism, a matter of superstition.  Assuming a nature-implanted tendency, we see that like human sacrifice it was held to be the most acceptable offering to the God-goddess in the Orgia or sacred ceremonies, a something set apart for peculiar worship.  Hence in Rome as in Egypt the temples of Isis (Inachidos limina, Isiacae sacraria Lunae) were centres of sodomy, and the religious practice was adopted by the grand priestly castes from Mesopotamia to Mexico and Peru.

We find the earliest written notices of the Vice in the mythical destruction of the Pentapolis (Gen. xix.), Sodom, Gomorrah (= ’Amirah, the cultivated country), Adama, Zeboim and Zoar or Bela.  The legend has been amply embroidered by the Rabbis who make the Sodomites do everything a l’envers:  e.g., if a man were wounded he was fined for bloodshed and was compelled to fee the offender; and if one cut off the ear of a neighbour’s ass he was condemned to keep the animal till the ear grew again.  The Jewish doctors declare the people to have been a race of sharpers with rogues for magistrates, and thus they justify the judgment which they read literally.  But the traveller cannot accept it.  I have carefully examined the lands at the North and at the South of that most beautiful lake, the so-called Dead Sea, whose tranquil loveliness, backed by the grand plateau of Moab, is an object of admiration to all save patients suffering from the strange disease “Holy Land on the Brain."[FN#390] But I found no traces of craters in the neighbourhood, no signs of vulcanism, no remains of “meteoric stones”:  the asphalt which named the water is a mineralised vegetable washed out of the limestones, and the sulphur and salt are