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letra de "terminal essay" - richard burton

sir richard francis burton: “terminal essay”, from his translation of the arabian nights, 1885
section d: pederasty

the ‘execrabilis familia pathicorum’ first came before me by a chance of earlier life. in 1845, when sir charles napier had conquered and annexed sind, despite a fraction (mostly venal) which sought favour with the now defunct ‘court of directors to the honourable east india company,’ the veteran began to consider his conquest with a curious eye. it was reported to him that karàchi, a townlet of some two thousand souls and distant not more than a mile from camp, supported no less than three lupanars or bordels, in which not women but boys and eunuchs, the former demanding nearly a double price, lay for hire. being then the only british officer who could speak sindi, i was asked indirectly to make enquiries and to report upon the subject; and i undertook the task on express condition that my report should not be forwarded to the bombay government, from whom supporters of the conqueror’s policy could expect scant favour, mercy or justice. accompanied by a munshi, mirza mohammed hosayn of shiraz, and habited as a merchant, mirza abdullah the bushiri p-ssed many an evening in the townlet visited all the p-rneia and obtained the fullest details which were duly despatched to government house. (…) subsequent enquiries in many and distant countries enabled me to arrive at the following conclusions:
there exists what i shall call a ‘sotadic zone,’ bounded westwards by the northern sh0r-s of the mediterranean (n. lat. 43 °) and by the southern (n. lat. 30°). thus the depth would be 780 to 800 miles including meridional france, the iberian peninsula, italy and greece, with the coast-regions of africa from marocco to egypt
running eastward the sotadic zone narrows, embracing asia minor, mesopotamia and chaldaea, afghanistan, sind, the punjab and kashmir
in indo-china the belt begins to broaden, enfolding china, j-pan and turkistan
it then embraces the south sea islands and the new world where, at the time of its discovery, sotadic love was, with some exceptions, an established racial inst-tution. within the sotadic zone the vice is popular and endemic, held at the worst to be a mere peccadillo, whilst the races to the north and south of the limits here defined practise it only sporadically amid the opprobrium of their fellows who, as a rule, are physically incapable of performing the operation and look upon it with the liveliest disgust. before entering into topographical details concerning pederasty, which i hold to be geographical and climatic, not racial, i must offer a few considerations of its cause and origin. we must not forget that the love of boys has its n0ble sentimental side. the platonists and pupils of the academy, followed by the sufis or moslem gnostics held such affection, pure as ardent, to be the beau idéal which united in man’s soul the creature with the creator. professing to regard youths as the most cleanly and beautiful objects in this phenomenal world, they declared that by loving and extolling the chef-d’œuvre, corporeal and intellectual, of the demiurgus, disinterestedly and without any admixture of carnal sensuality, they are paying the most fervent adoration to the causa causans. they add that such affection, p-ssing as it does the love of women, is far less selfish than fondness for and admiration of the other s-x which, however innocent, always suggest s-xuality; [4] and easterns add that the devotion of the moth to the taper is purer and more fervent than the bulbul’s love for the rose. amongst the greeks of the best ages the system of boy-favourites was advocated on considerations of morals and politics. the lover undertook the education of the beloved through precept and example, while the two were conjoined by a tie stricter than the fraternal. hieronymus the peripatetic strongly advocated it because the vigorous disposition of youths and the confidence engendered by their -ssociation often led to the overthrow of tyrannies. socrates declared that ‘a most valiant army might be composed of boys and their lovers; for that of all men they would be most ashamed to desert one another.’ and even virgil, despite the foul flavour of formosum pastor corydon, could write: nisus amore pio pueri. the only physical cause for the practice which suggests itself to me and that must be owned to be purely conjectural, is that within the sotadic zone there is a blending of the masculine and feminine temperaments, a crasis which elsewhere occurs only sporadically. hence the male féminisme whereby the man becomes patiens as well as agens, and the woman a tribade, a votary of mascula sappho,[5] queen of frictrices or rubbers.[6] prof. mantegazza claims to have discovered the cause of this pathological love, this perversion of the erotic sense, one of the marvellous list of amorous vagaries which deserve, not prosecution but the pitiful care of the physician and the study of the psychologist. according to him the nerves of the r-ct-m and the genitalia, in all cases closely connected, are abnormally so in the pathic who obtains, by intromission, the venereal -rg-sm which is usually sought through the s-xual organs. so amongst women there are tribads who can procure no pleasure except by foreign objects introduced a posteriori. hence his threefold distribution of sodomy; (1) periphic or anatomical, caused by an unusual distribution of the nerves and their hyperaesthesia; (2) luxurious, when love a tergo is preferred on account of the narrowness of the p-ssage; and (3) the psychical. but this is evidently superficial: the question is what causes this neuropathy, this abnormal distribution and condition of the nerves

- richard burton

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