The Mother Goddess and Her Homosexuals
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The Mother Goddess and Her Homosexuals
Homosexuality is the norm, while heterosexuality is an anomaly. This thesis is now well known. We
know in what kind of environments it germinated and what kinds of environments have been
disseminating it over the last few decades. More or less recent discoveries in zoology and
anthropology confirm it as fully from an evolutionary point of view as they refute it.
categorically from a superior point of view. On the one hand, studies of sexual behaviour in the animal
world have shown not only that homosexuality is an important aspect of animal sexuality, but that many
species engage in homosexual practices far more often than heterosexual ones, not to mention the fact
that homosexuality seems to contribute to the successful reproduction of certain species. On the other
hand, an examination of sexual practices among savages and more generally in ancient non-white
civilisations has shown that
homosexuality has always been widespread (i). According to the evolutionist postulate, it follows that,
as man is descended from the ape, human sexuality has its origins in the sexuality of the
primates, that, since homosexuality is common among primates, it must also be common among
humans and that, since everything that is natural is by the same token positive and, by extension,
normative, it is not only natural, but normal, for humans to be homosexual. Similarly, according to an old
humanist postulate that has endured, the savage, having had no contact with society, is on the contrary
remained close to the state of nature, and as a result would have retained specific qualities considered as
"natural".
As homosexuality is one of these qualities, it is established as the sexual norm for all men. Basically,
the first postulate derives from the second, and the doctrine of evolution is the logical outcome of the
theory of the 'good savage'. Once the scientific mind has been
sentimentality in schizophrenic thinking, for which any individual in a state of schizophrenia is a victim.
nature is the human ideal, it is mechanically fatal that it should come to attribute to man a rank even
lower than that occupied by savages in the animal kingdom. In psychological terms, the scientists
who defend the theory of man's simian origin have never succeeded in doing anything other than
to prove that they think of themselves as the offspring of primates. The reality is that, as Julius Evola
pointed out in the wake of Joseph de Maistre, the ape descended from man by involution and that,
Similarly, savage peoples, far from being primitive in the sense of original, are the degenerate, twilight,
senescent remnants of races that disappeared in remote times. Their inclination towards
homosexuality is just one of the symptoms of their degeneration. The endemic homosexuality that has
been seen in white countries for several decades can only be interpreted from a psychological point of
view as a collective regression, a primitivisation and, from a racist point of view, as one of the many
dysgenic effects of miscegenation. This is where the historical considerations developed in The Origins
and Role of Same-Sex Relations in Human Societies, a hymn to male homosexuality, are of great
interest.
from a racist perspective. Iconographic evidence of homosexual behaviour can be found as far back
as the Palaeolithic among the Amerindians, all of whom appear to have descended from a
population of the
Upper Palaeolithic originating from the site of Mal'ta in central Siberia (ii), which is thought to have
mingled very early on in its arrival on the continent later known as America with tribes from Greenland
(iii).
from the western Pacific, which are the result of crossbreeding between Negroid, Caucasoid and
mongoloids (iii). The statuettes of women found at the Mal'ta archaeological site suggest that
that the corresponding culture, the first known in this region, may have been a matriarchal society
(iv) (iv bis). Similarly, a number of Polynesian and Melanesian clans
have the characteristics of matriarchal societies (v), to such an extent that the right of the mother is
(vi) and that male homosexuality is central to the rituals performed in honour of the local mother
goddesses (vii). It is particularly interesting and significant to note that, in historical times, ritual male
homosexuality was one of the characteristics of the civilisation that is actually considered to be the
very first urban civilisation: Sumer, where, there
Ritual male homosexuality was still intimately linked to the cult of the mother goddess, as it would be
in the Judeo-Canaanite civilisation (viii). The author does not seem to have realised the significance of
this, nor its persistence in the present day, albeit in subtle forms and in hushed atmospheres, without
any reduction in the number of propitiatory sacrifices to the mother goddess. The homosexual priests
of the mother goddess were second-rate priests. Who could be their successors today, if not members
of the underworld of t h e arts and 'culture', journalism, fashion and 'com', to which we must
naturally add the
prostitutes ? (ix) (ix bis)
At the end of the last Ice Age, hunter-gatherers, some of whom had formed communities, began to
supplement their diet of game, nuts and berries with cereals, which they had learnt to cultivate in
small plots adjacent to their homes. At around the same time, they began to raise young animals
f r o m wild herds of cattle, sheep and goats, m a k i n g it much easier for them to obtain meat. The
development of agriculture and livestock farming had an impact on
on these tribes. Indeed, academics present the emergence of agriculture as a demarcation line in the
development of human culture and refer to it as the
The Paleolithic, or Old Stone Age, refers to the period when the first hunter-gatherer societies
developed, and the Neolithic, or New Stone Age, to the period when agriculture developed.
Whereas the hunter-gatherers of the Palaeolithic had a nomadic state, the cultivation of cereals tied the
first farmers to the land in specific places and made their way of life more stable. Similarly, the myths and
rituals of the hunter-gatherers, which involved mystical communication with the spirits of the animals they
hunted to eat, gave way to rituals designed to promote fertile livestock and abundant harvests. The way
of life of the North American Indians was similar to that of the Paleolithic tribes before Europeans
colonised the continent. Before this colonisation, the Indians of the Great Plains had a way of life similar
to that of the Palaeolithic clans who hunted large herds of grazing animals on the plains of Eurasia that
lay south of the Pleistocene ice fields. The Plains Indians
hunted the herds of bison that roamed the North American plains, depending on their meat for food and
their hides for clothing and shelter. Attached more to the buffalo herds than to the land, the Indian
tribes of the Great Plains moved with the herds. The Pueblos, on the other hand, grew maize in the
American south-west and lived in communities in mud-brick dwellings close to their crops. While the
Indians of the Great Plains dressed themselves in animal skins and stored their grain i n straw baskets,
the Pueblos wove their clothes and made ceramic pottery to store their grain.
From 9,000 BC onwards, sedentary communities similar to those of the Pueblos began to form in
the fertile river valleys of the Middle East. They grew wheat and barley, cereals that at the time
grew wild in a belt stretching from Asia to the Americas.
The first farming communities flourished thanks to the mild climate and regular rainfall in the
mountainous areas of this region. In the eighth millennium BC, towns made of mud-brick houses,
similar to those of the Pueblos, began to be built.
Ceramic pottery first appeared around 8,000 BC at Jericho, the site of a large oasis, and shortly
afterwards at Jarmo, in northern Mesopotamia (1). Ceramic pottery was invented around 6500 BC, at
Çatal Hüyük, in southern Anatolia (2) and, by the beginning of the following millennium, copper tools
were being used in the east of this region (3).
It is obviously impossible to know with any certainty to what extent homosexuality existed in these
early clans and tribes. However, given the impact of strong homosexual tendencies in primates on
human sexual evolution, and what the existence of homosexuality in virtually every aboriginal tribal
society in the world reveals about human sexuality, it is
There seems to be little doubt that homosexuality was widespread among Neolithic tribes, as it had
been among Palaeolithic tribes; it also seems certain that it had similar patterns to those observed
among today's tribal populations. Over the millennia
In the years that followed, as knowledge of food crops and animal husbandry slowly spread throughout
the above-mentioned region, an increasingly refined way of life developed among the peoples who
lived there. The division of labour and the specialisation of roles became increasingly complex, and a
multitude of professions emerged in agriculture, crafts and trade.
By 4500 BC, a fine ceramic, painted with sophisticated geometric motifs, was being used in a number of
countries.
manufactured throughout northern Mesopotamia and exported as far as the Mediterranean coast
(4). The rituals of the Palaeolithic shamans evolved into complex rituals presided over by a priesthood
that began to exert increasing influence and authority in the communities. Mediators between these
communities and the goddess, who was thought to influence the fertility of crops and the fecundity of
livestock, the priests gradually came to manage and coordinate the work involved in agricultural
production.
At the beginning of the fourth millennium BC, the peoples who settled in the fertile delta between the
Tigris, Euphrates and Persian Gulf discovered the irrigation techniques of the
crops. Thanks to this advance, they were able to harvest such abundant crops that, for the first time in
history, they were able to grow their own crops.
On one occasion, a people produced more food than they needed to survive. The surpluses were traded
with distant peoples for raw materials such as wood and stone.
This enabled the cities of the delta to experience the same economic growth as the region's farming
villages. A section of society no longer had to fight daily for its survival like the men of the early days,
and was able to
devote time to political administration and to intellectual and artistic activities. Writing was invented,
astronomy and the mathematical sciences were developed, and a new architecture was created.
and figurative art replaced the essentially decorative art of the Middle Ages.
earlier. The resulting political, economic and cultural achievements formed the basis of the civilisation
that later became known as Sumerian. The economic and political infrastructure that developed in
these city-states served as a prototype for the Babylonian and Assyrian civilisations that would follow.
were to succeed them, and to the great civilisations that were to emerge later in Egypt and around the
Mediterranean, in the Indus Valley in India and in China.
During their thousand years of flourishing development, the Mesopotamian city-states remained an
island of civilisation in a sea of Neolithic tribal cultures. O v e r time, the prosperous Sumerians
became the target of increasingly frequent predations and invasions by neighbouring mountain tribes
and nomadic peoples from the arid steppes to the north and south. From the south, the nomadic
Semitic tribes moved north, not only in search of greener pastures, but also because they were
attracted by the wealth of the Sumerian city-states. Around 2300 BC, Sargon the Great, a warrior-king
descended from the nomadic Semitic tribes who had settled to the north and west of the river valley,
conquered the Mesopotamian city-states and united them in a political union that became the
Akkadian Empire. Towards the end of the third millennium BC, after a brief restoration of Sumerian
power, the Semitic people of the Amorites conquered the region and formed the Babylonian Empire,
which was to last, in one form or another, for almost two thousand years. Over the following
centuries, Sumerian culture
had a strong influence on life in Babylon, so much so that much of the literature and documents
continued to be written in Sumerian. Similarly, the Assyrians, who succeeded the Amorite rulers in
Babylon, adopted virtually unchanged the Babylonian political structure and legal tradition, as well as
the cult rituals that had been practised by the Sumerians since earliest times. Because of the
continuity of artistic, political, legal and religious traditions from Sumerian to Assyrian times, it is
possible to consider the successive cultures of Mesopotamia as a whole.
Homosexual practices in Mesopotamia
The archaeological remains of these Mesopotamian cultures reveal a complex, stratified society whose
ruling class lived in luxury, supported by an organised and prosperous working class. Graceful pottery,
luxury objects, magnificently crafted jewellery and objets d'art bear witness to the refinement of the
Babylonian way of life. The art objects, legal texts and
The religious documents and literature that have survived from this period provide an insight into the
social and sexual habits of the people. This material amply demonstrates that, at the dawn of the
historical period, the homosexual practices of the Babylonians, very probably inherited from the customs
of their Neolithic ancestors, were already well established among the inhabitants of the oldest of
civilisations.
Among the artefacts found in the archaeological remains are numerous terracotta statuettes of couples
having sex, many of which depict two men, one of them
practises sodomy on the other. These statuettes, dated to the beginning of the third millennium BC, have
been found in Uruk, Assur, Susa and Babylon and provide solid evidence that the practices of sodomy
were practised in the ancient world.
homosexuality was widespread among the peoples of this ancient civilisation (5). Another source o f
information on the sexual behaviour of Mesopotamian peoples can be found in legal texts from the
Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian periods. The Code of Hammurabi, dating from around 1700 BC,
contains provisions relating to certain aspects of sexuality such as adultery and prostitution, but makes
no mention of homosexuality. The absence
of prohibitions against homosexuality in a civilisation where there is every indication that this sexual
behaviour was present proves that it was accepted. An Assyrian code of law from the middle of the
second millennium BC contains two provisions concerning homosexuality. Paragraph 19 provides for a
criminal penalty against a man who starts "a rumour about his neighbour in private, claiming:that people
have slept with him on several occasions and who is unable to substantiate his accusation." Another
provision of the Code punishes a man for accusing a neighbour's wife, without proof, of having sex with
a woman.
behave like a prostitute, taking many lovers (6). Another paragraph states that a man who rapes
another man must himself be subjected to forced penetration (7). These laws would have made no
sense if homosexuality had not been an integral part of life.
daily life of the inhabitants of Mesopotamia.
Other evidence has come down to us of the importance of homosexuality in the lives of the
Mesopotamians. King Hammurabi himself is known to have had lovers. Zimri-Lin, king of Mari in
western Mesopotamia, also had a number of lovers, and his wife mentions them in a letter (8). An
Assyrian astrological text in verse that deals with the effect of the stars on virility and love indicates
that the region of Libra is a good omen for a man who wants to make himself loved by a
woman, that of Pisces, for a woman who wants to be loved by a man and that of Scorpio for a man
who wants to be loved by a man (9). An almanac of incantations from the period
contains prayers to be said by a man who wants to be loved by a woman, by a woman who wants to be loved
by a man, and by a woman who wants to be loved by a man.
woman who wants to be loved by a man, as well as prayers to be said by a man who wants to be loved
by another man. Other religious tablets have been found that contain passages on homosexual relations:
"if, for example, a man has sexual relations with his companion...". (10). The context in which lesbianism
is mentioned in texts of this kind is not always clear.
gender suggests that it was also commonplace (11). The references to homosexual love, alongside and in
the same context as the references to heterosexual love, show that the acceptance of relationships
between homosexuals and heterosexuals was also commonplace.
people of the same sex must have been rooted in the daily lives of the Mesopotamians and that, for
them, the sexual love of a man for a man was considered a legitimate alternative to
love between men and women.
A Babylonian religious divination text contains predictions based on sexual acts, some of which are
homosexual. According to one of them, "if a man penetrates his equal from behind, that man will be
the first among his brothers and colleagues". According to another, "if a man has sexual relations with
a sacred prostitute, he will have no more trouble". According to a third, "if a man has sexual relations
with a courtier, the worry that was gnawing at him will disappear for the whole of the following year".
Others, however, were critical of homosexual behaviour: "if a
man wishes to express his virility in prison and, like a sacred prostitute, he therefore wishes to have
sexual relations with men, he is behaving badly"; or: "if a man has sexual relations with men, he is
behaving badly".
with a slave, he'll be in trouble" (12); this may be a warning against
passive homosexuality among ordinary citizens. Although homosexuality itself was not considered
negative, it seems that the context in which it was practised and the social status of the partners
were matters of concern for the Babylonians.
Homosexuality and religious practices
The sacred prostitutes mentioned in this text are strangely reminiscent in their specialised role of the
transvestite priests encountered by the conquistadors in Mesoamerica over three thousand years
later.
From the very beginnings of Sumerian civilisation, a large proportion of the temple and palace staff
were individuals who, like the two-spirit of the American Indians, were considered to be neither male
nor female - in short, a third sex. The registers of a Sumerian temple
from the middle of the third millennium BC mention gala priests (Akkadian: kalû), who were created,
according to a Babylonian text, by the god Enki to sing "soothing laments" t o the glory of the goddess
Inanna. Their homosexual inclinations are clear from this Sumerian proverb: "When the gala washes
his behind, he says: 'I must not stimulate what belongs to my wife.
mistress (Inanna)". In fact, the word gala (13a) was written with the signs for "penis" (giš3) and "anus"
(dur), an explicit reference to the homosexuality of these male priests.
A similar figure appears in Sumerian mythology and liturgical texts from 2000 BC onwards, that of the
kurgarru (13b), which is found in Akkadian texts under t h e name kurgarru. In Babylonian and
Assyrian texts, kurgarru is generally associated with a
another closely related figure, the assinu (13c). The sexual nature of the assinu appears
clearly in the fact that the noun assinu has the same root as the verb assinutu, "to practise sodomy
" (14). The gala are also mentioned in texts describing Babylonian and Assyrian ritual, in which they
seem to have played an even greater role than in Sumerian ritual. These various homosexual priests
played a central role in the cult of the Mesopotamian goddess right up to Roman times.
The Mesopotamian cult of the goddess has its origins in the cults of the Neolithic period, which are
themselves very different from those of the Mesopotamian period.
even from Paleolithic cults. The earliest known representations of a deity a r e figurines and sculptures
of a female goddess found at scattered sites across the Eurasian landmass, from Western Europe to
Siberia, some dating back to 25,000 BC (15). Evidence of veneration of the goddess in early Neolithic
agricultural settlements has been found in Anatolia and the Middle East (16). Excavations under the
direction of the renowned archaeologist James Mellaart at Çatal Hüyük in Turkey, site
from a colony dating back to 7500 BC, have established the continuity of the cult of the mother
goddess from the Sumerian period to the Upper Palaeolithic (17). Once they had t a k e n up farming
and livestock breeding, the abundance of their harvests and the fertility of their animals took on a
primordial importance for the Neolithic peoples and became the subject of religious rituals. In
Neolithic farming villages, the goddess, symbolising the generative power of nature, was generally
associated with the image of a bull, representing the moon god, whose fertilising power was believed
to ensure the fertility of herds and abundant harvests. The imagery of the mother cow impregnated
by the bull god reflected the importance of their herds to their livelihood. Numerous statuettes of
the goddess accompanied by images of the bull have been found in the remains of villages in the
region dating back to 6500 BC (18).
With the invasions of the Middle East by ferocious warriors in the Bronze Age - of Sumer by the
The cult of the mother goddess was relegated to second place by the patriarchal male divinities that the
invaders brought with them (19), as was the case with the Semites of Akkad under Sargon the Great,
Anatolia and Persia by the Indo-Europeans, Babylon by Hammurabi's Amorites and Canaan by the
Hebrews.
Nevertheless, the mother goddess, in her various forms, remained, as did the fertility cults and the
This was an important part of the cult in the ancient world, from the Mediterranean to India, right up to
the beginning of the Christian period. Called Inanna, or Queen of Heaven,
by the Sumerians, the goddess was called Ishtar by the Akkadians and Babylonians. In Egypt, where the
The Pharaoh's ceremonial dress was adorned with a bull's tail, symbolising his role as husband to the
goddess. The temple of the Phoenician goddess Astarte
was served by homosexual priests called kelev, the cult of the Anatolian goddess Cybele was served by
homosexual priests called galli. Few people know that the cult of the goddess was also a feature of the
religion of the early Israelites and that, in fact, one of the temples in Jerusalem was home to
homosexuals, the kadesh, until the seventh century BC.
In some parts of India, the goddess, known as Shakti, is still worshipped by transvestites known as
hijras, and her temples were home to sacred male prostitutes of both sexes until the 20th century
(20).
An essential element of the Mesopotamian cult of the goddess was the sacred marriage ceremony,
which was celebrated on New Year's Day and during which the sexual union of the bull-moon and the
goddess
was represented by the king and a temple attendant respectively. The mating that took place during
this ritual was considered necessary for good harvests and the fertility of the livestock. The type of
he sympathetic magic employed in this sexual ritual is peculiar to the rituals of primitive tribal cultures
and is indicative of the antiquity of Mesopotamian religion. It is thought that a similar ritual was
performed annually in the Sumerian city of Uruk between a temple attendant, who played t h e role of
Inanna, and the king, who embodied Dumuzi, the Sumerian moon god. Numerous sensual songs
celebrating the love between Inanna and Dumuzi and illustrations of the ritual have been found on
cylinder seals from the same period. A cylinder seal from the Sumerian city of Elam from the beginning
of the second millennium BC depicts Inanna and Dumuzi as a naked couple on a bed. The
The sexual charge of the cult of the Mesopotamian goddess is explicitly indicated by a Babylonian
hymn from the beginning of the second millennium BC, which describes Ishtar as a sacred prostitute
whom 120 men cannot satisfy. Similarly, the Syrian goddess Qudshu, associated with
of love and fertility, is called "the prostitute" on a monument erected in her honour in Egypt, where
her cult was popular in the second millennium BC (21).
Sexual rituals of the same kind were also performed throughout the year by individuals wishing to
obtain the protection, or favours, of the divinity. One of the main functions of homosexual temple
servants was to have sexual relations with worshippers.
in the place of the goddess. The sperm deposited in the bodies of these men was an offering to the
goddess. The sum of money they paid to the temple in exchange for this service went towards its
upkeep. This practice has been called "sacred prostitution", a somewhat misleading term, since the
corresponding rituals were an integral part of the cult and did not simply consist of a "ritual".
sex trade. Some researchers doubt that the temple attendants actually indulged the sexual desires of the
faithful. However, as we have already pointed out - the hieroglyph for "gala" combines the signs for penis
and anus and the word "assinu" derives from the verb "to sodomise" - the
The names of some of them and the many textual references both to the homosexual relations they had
in a ritual setting and to the divine favours, or good fortune, that awaited the men who had sexual
relations with them, leave no doubt as to the nature of
their function.
Transsexuals and people of the third sex also played an important role in the palaces. Court officials
were called either sa'ziqni ('bearded') or sa'res ('beardless'), a term that has sometimes been
translated as 'eunuch' (22a). It is highly likely that these men were not eunuchs per se, but passive
homosexuals. An important class of his res were the girsequ; in Sumerian texts from the end of the
third millennium BC, where they
appear as palace or temple servants, they are often presented as attached to kings, while oniromantic
treatises mention them in the same context as assinu, i.e. as sexual objects entirely at the disposal of men.
Beardless figures of this kind are depicted on Assyrian bas-reliefs as musicians or royal assistants (22b).
As we saw above, the sexual rituals in which priests of the third sex, or transvestite priests, took
part in Mesopotamian civilisation bear remarkable similarities to those practised in Mesoamerican
cultures with which
came into contact with the conquistadors. Cieza de Leon describes with disgust the practices of the
priests he witnessed in Peru: "In every temple or important place of worship, they have a man or two,
or more, dressed as women from childhood, talking like women and imitating them in manners,
clothes and everything. The.men, especially the chiefs, have carnal, impure relations with them on
feasts and holy days, as if it were a rite or ceremony (23)." The homosexual rituals of the cult of the
Mesopotamian goddess also bear a striking resemblance to a ritual
Hopi, during which the berdache, or two-spirit, graced with the title of 'Maize Virgin', is sodomised by
the brave Hopi in order to guarantee a good maize harvest (24). Similarly, among the Mandan Sioux,
the two-spirit was sodomised by the young braves of the tribe, so that the tribe would have an
abundance of buffalo (25).
The remarkable similarities between the mythical beliefs of Mesopotamia and those of the indigenous
peoples of the Americas do not end there. The Mesopotamians believed that the gala, assinu and
kurgarru were called and literally transformed into women by the goddess. Similarly, certain American
tribes believed that berdaches fulfilled their vocation at the behest of a soul, or "goddess".
of a goddess (26). Just as the American Indians believed that berdaches were created by the Great
Spirit for the well-being of their tribes, so the Sumerians considered sacred prostitution, like royalty,
justice and truth, to be an institution of divine right (27). Many plains Indians believed that having sex
with a berdache before a battle
brought good luck. Similarly, the Babylonians believed that having sex with an assinu, or kurgarru,
brought good luck. Like the berdache, the assinu was considered to have magical powers: according
to one text, "if a man touches the head of an assinu, he will defeat his enemy". For
to ward off the threat posed by a lunar eclipse, the king would ritually touch the head of an assinu
(28). Like the berdache, the assinu was said to have the power to cure illness and foretell the future.
Just as the berdache was the guardian of the traditions of ritual dance and song, so the gala, assinu
and kurgarru sang hymns to the goddess, performed ritual dances and played the role of musician in
the temples. In short, the berdache and transvestite priests of ancient Mesopotamia were
considered to be institutions of divine right, were supposed to have been called by a goddess who
had transformed their sexuality, were the sexual objects of other goddesses, and were considered to
be the object of the goddess's love.
men, to whom they brought good luck, were supposed to be endowed with magical powers and, in this
They acted as healers and seers, and were the main performers o f ritual dances and songs.
Linguistic and cultural evidence suggests that it was in prehistoric times that people of the third sex
began to fulfil these specialised roles. In fact, some researchers believe that kurgarru may date back to
5600 BC, long before the development of temple civilisation, which would indicate that the first to
occupy this role were probably the transvestite shamans of the Neolithic tribes (29), whose functions
may have been fulfilled by other such figures as early as the Palaeolithic period, during w h i c h it is
thought that major migrations took place from Asia to America.
Male-male love
The specialised roles of people of the third sex represent just one aspect of the diversity of sexuality
among the peoples of ancient Mesopotamia. The many references in religious and astrological texts to
love between members of the same sex clearly show that homosexual experiences were part of the
lives of ordinary men and women, as well as transvestite attendants in temples and palaces. Indeed,
sexual love between two virile heroes is a
The central theme of the Epic of Gilgamesh, an extraordinary work of literature that originated in
Sumerian legends and was a great success for thousands of years in the ancient Near East.
Historical times began with the invention of writing, around 3200 BC, in the Sumerian city-states. The
Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest known literary work, was written around the middle of the third
millennium BC and is based on a Sumerian legend that already existed in the ancient world.
oral tradition (30), deals largely with the love of the hero, Gilgamesh, for one of his companions,
Enkidu.
Gilgamesh, the legendary king of the Sumerian city of Uruk, was born of the union of a mortal man with
a goddess. Through his mother, a goddess, he was endowed not only with exceptional physical
strength, but also with great beauty, a large chest and, the texts say with approval, a large phallus (31).
At the beginning of the story, Gilgamesh is already a mature man, "superior to all the others".
men in beauty and strength, driven by the unfulfilled desires of his semi-divine nature, against which no
one is a match in love or war" (32). Endowed with extraordinary vigour
Gilgamesh never ceases to pursue the sons and daughters of the city of Uruk, which never ceases to
worry its inhabitants. They prayed to the goddess to protect their sons and daughters from
Gilgamesh's concupiscence. The people implored the goddess with these words: "It is you, Aruru,
who
create this man, now create for him a rival, let him be comparable to him in strength of heart and
body, let them fight ceaselessly together, so that Uruk will gain peace and tranquillity." In response,
the goddess "washed her hands, took a handful of clay and threw it into the plain...".
And so she created the valiant Enkidu. Gilgamesh, fascinated by the tales he had heard of a great wild
man with a "body covered in hair" who had been seen on the plain, sent a temple prostitute in search
of him. When the courtesan found him, she said: "I will show you Gilgamesh full of life, and you will
look at him and examine his face, glowing with virility and vigour. His body shines with charm and
seduction, he is more vigorous than you, and he never stops day or night. She added: "The god
Shamash (the great god) loves Gilgamesh and protects him. Anu, Enlil and Ea have granted him vast
ears, even before you leave the plain Gilgamesh in Uruk will see you in his dreams". (33). As expected,
Gilgamesh dreamt of Enkidu before meeting him. He recounted his dream to his mother: "I walked
proudly among the heroes, the sky shone with stars, and a star, like a hero from the sky of Anou fell
towards
me. I tried to carry her, but she was too heavy. I tried to push her, but I couldn't move her. Around
her, the locals gathered and kissed her feet. I loved her and bent over her, as one bends over a
woman, I lifted her up and laid her at your feet, and you made her equal to me.
His mother, the goddess, interpreted his dream as follows: "The star in the sky, the one like you, the
one that fell on you like a hero from the sky of Anou, the one you wanted to carry that was too heavy
for you, the one you wanted to push that you couldn't move, the one you loved that you leaned over
as one bends over a woman, the one you laid at my feet, the one I made equal to you, represents a
faithful companion full of strength who will come to your aid. He is the strongest in the land and of
great vigour; his strength and vigour are like those of Anou. The fact that you have loved him, that you
have leaned over him as one leans over a woman, means that he will always be with you, that he will
never abandon you."
Gilgamesh then dreamt of a great axe and told his mother about his dream: "I saw an axe. I loved it
and bent over it as if it were a woman, then I laid it at your feet and you made it equal to me". In
another translation of this passage, by the great scholar Thorkild Jacobsen, the sexual nature of the
relationship is even more explicit: "I loved her and bent over her like a woman, then I laid her at your
feet and you made her equal to me.
I loved her and lived with her as if she were a woman. (34) Gilgamesh's mother explained to him that it
was not an axe. "The axe you saw is a man. That you loved it, that you bent over it as you bend over a
woman, and that I made it equal to you, means that a faithful companion full of strength will come to
your aid. He is the strongest in the land and of great vigour."
If there was still any doubt about the sexual connotations of these two dreams, several puns in the
story underline the sexual nature of the relationship that is foretold to Gilgamesh. In the first
dream, kisru, the word for the meteorite that fell from the sky and towards which Gilgamesh "leaned as
towards a woman", resembles the word kezru, prostitute. Similarly, assinu, the word for axe,
resembles the word "assinu", a homosexual employed in the service of a temple (35). The sexual
connotations of the puns made about the very objects Gilgamesh makes love to in his dreams and which
The fact that Enkidu represented the companion who had been announced to him would not have
escaped the notice of contemporaries. When Enkidu arrived in Uruk, the men of the city fell under his
spell: "The men rejoiced, saying, 'He is now a hero and a rival like our hero; yes, for Gilgamesh, like a
god, he is now like, and like.'" When Enkidu met Gilgamesh, the latter was
was about to invite himself into a wedding party and deflower the bride, but Enkidu blocked his path.
"One holding the other they struggle. Like wild bulls they roar, they break t h e doorpost and the wall
shakes. Gilgamesh and Enkidu, holding each other, struggle like two wild bulls". Gilgamesh emerged
victorious from the fight. Enkidu said to him: "You are unique among men; you are truly the son of
your mother, the goddess Ninsoun, the wild cow. She gave birth to you and the god Enlil raised your
head above men, so he destined you for royalty". (36). After which, "They kissed, sealing their
friendship". Delighted with his new companion, Gilgamesh began to behave like a true king, acting
solely in the interests of his city and his people.
Since it is inconceivable that the central figure of a legend, or an epic, does not reflect the values and
feelings of the audience for whom it was written, it follows that the relationships between the
characters and the audience must be based on the same values and feelings.
homosexuality between virile men was known and even admired in the Sumerian city-states where the
legend of Gilgamesh was born, and later in the Akkadian and Babylonian civilisations, where it was
written down. As mythology generally reflects the values of a people in a metaphorical way, the story
of Gilgamesh and Enkidu can be seen as representative of the tendency of the Sumerian, Babylonian
and Akkadian peoples to give excessive sexual energy to the idea of the "good life".
(Gilgamesh) a direction (Gilgamesh's friendship with Enkidu) that promotes the well-being of society.
It is clear from the way the relationship is presented that the people hope it will benefit society. In
their prayer to the goddess Aruru, the people clearly express what they want: "It was you Aruru who
created this man, now create for him a rival, let him be comparable to him in strength of heart and
body, let them fight ceaselessly together, so that Uruk will gain peace and tranquillity". It's worth
noting that in the languages of the ancient Near East - and even today in Arabic - a commonly used
expression for sexual arousal is "lifting of the heart". So, in praying for the birth of someone "who is by
force of heart... comparable" to Gilgamesh, the people of Uruk clearly wanted Gilgamesh to have a
sexually matched companion, so that they could "gain peace and tranquillity". As Thorkild Jacobsen
sums up, "Aruru hears their prayers and creates Enkidu, a being whose sexual vigour is as great as
Gilgamesh's, so that, falling in love with each other, they can neutralise each other and the inhabitants
of Uruk can regain 'tranquillity'" (37a).
It is also significant that the people did not pray for Gilgamesh to marry, even though, given
Gilgamesh's royal status, he probably already had a wife. The epic clearly indicates that, in this culture,
contemporaries did not consider reproduction to be the sole purpose of the sexual drive. In a stable,
prosperous society with a steadily growing population, it was possible to have a wife.
There was no need to restrict sexual activity to reproduction, and it may be that the Sumerians and
Babylonians thought it desirable to divert their sexual urges away from heterosexual adventures.
nature has endowed man with (37b).
Indeed, the prominence given in the epic to the friendship between the two men underlines the
recognition that one of the primary aims of human sexual desire is not the satisfaction of sexual desire,
but the satisfaction of sexual desire.
sexuality itself, nor necessarily procreation, but companionship. In fact, it is through the loss of what
Gilgamesh has loved most - his beloved companion, Enkidu - that the hero is driven to set off in search
of immortality and the meaning of life, the central theme of the epic. This theme of character
he transitory nature of life and existence is one of the most profound questions facing mankind, and
one that recurs repeatedly in the greatest works of art produced by human culture. That the loss of a
beloved companion by this virile hero should serve as the basis for the development of the main
theme of this epic is eloquent testimony to the positive judgement
the Mesopotamians had about love affairs between virile men.
Evidence of homosexual behaviour in ancient Egypt
Around the time of the great Sumerian city-state civilisation, what would become an even greater
civilisation was beginning to take shape in Egypt, once again in the midst of a verdant and fertile river
valley. But, protected from nomadic invasions by the vast deserts that surrounded it, the indigenous
Egyptian culture developed into a unique and sophisticated civilisation,
which, on the whole, remained sheltered from outside influences. And here, too, scientists have found
evidence that homosexuality was common and accepted, and that homosexual practices were no
different from those prevalent in ancient South-West Asia.
As the Egyptians paid particular attention to the funerary rites of the pharaohs and the
The fact that the Egyptians were not the only dignitaries, and were generally obsessed with the
afterlife, means that our knowledge of Egyptian culture and customs comes mainly from the tombs
that have survived and from
various documents found near the mummified bodies they contain. As a result, there is little evidence
of the erotic lives of the ancient Egyptians. The scarcity of
documents relating to their sex lives can probably also be explained by their modesty.
Although most Egyptologists and historians maintain that homosexuality was unknown to the ancient
Egyptians and that, in fact, they disapproved of it, there is enough evidence to show not o n l y that
homosexuality was a well-known phenomenon to the Egyptians, but that it appears to have been a
common practice among them.
to have been a fact of everyday life. A hieroglyphic inscription in a tomb from the
The third millennium BC tells us that King Pepi II Neferkare visited one of his generals, Sisine, a senior
bachelor civil servant, every evening to have a good time (38). Numerous erotic drawings show tender
embraces between pharaohs and young men. A 12th Dynasty drawing engraved on a pillar in the
Temple of Amun at Karnak shows the pharaoh Senusret I
tenderly embracing his friend Phtah (39). An engraving on a stele shows Akhnaten caressing his son-inlaw,
Smenkhare. The two men are naked, something very rare in royal Egyptian iconography.
Smenkhare received the affectionate titles that had previously been given to Akhnaten's concubines.
An Egyptian tomb from the third millennium BC was found to have been built for two courtiers, one of
whom was apparently a court barber. The two men are depicted in suggestive poses in bas-reliefs from
the tomb (40).
The ancient Egyptians believed that it was a good omen to have homosexual relations with a god. One
coffin bears the words: "I will swallow Re's phallus". Another coffin reads, in reference to the god Geb:
"His phallus is between the buttocks of his son and heir". Instructions from the vizier Ptahotep (around
2600 BC) advise against sodomising a young boy against his will, indicating 1) that anal intercourse
between men was so common that the need arose to combat abuse and 2) that there was nothing
wrong with practising sodomy on a young boy if he was willing.
An episode in Egyptian mythology in which two deities, Horus and Set, have anal intercourse is further
proof that the Egyptians were aware of homosexuality (41). As reported in a Middle Kingdom papyrus
dating from the third millennium BC and quoted by Vern Bullough, "Then the majesty of Set said to the
majesty of Horus: 'How beautiful is your hindquarters! ... Then the majesty of Horus said to his mother
Isis; "Set to know me [carnally]." Then she said to him, "Beware, do not give him your consent to this
when he has spoken to you about it once more. You'll have to tell him. It's much too painful for me
because you are much too heavy for me. My strength can't cope with your strength, you'll tell him.
When he has presented you with his strength, you will have to place your fingers
between your buttocks... Look, he will find it extremely pleasant [...] the semen from his phallus without
letting Ra see it" (42) Horus, following the advice of his mother, Isis, collected in the palm of his hand the
semen from his phallus.
hand the sperm ejaculated by Set and, while Set was looking the other way, threw it into a river. When
Horus told Isis what had happened, she asked him to emit sperm himself and give it to her. She took
Horus' sperm, spread it on a lettuce and offered it to Seth, who ate it.
When Set boasted to the other gods that he had dominated Horus sexually, Horus denied everything.
To settle their dispute, the gods summoned the seed of Horus and that of Seth. Seth's seed answered
the gods from the bottom of the stream where Horus had thrown it, while Horus' seed came out of
Seth's forehead in the form of a golden disc. The gods therefore gave credence to Horus' version of the
story.
had given of the incident. Then one of the gods, Thoth, removed the golden disc from Seth's head and
placed it on his own head. It was from this moment onwards that, in Egyptian mythology, Thoth was
considered to be the "god of the gods".
as the god of the moon. The accession of Thoth to the status of moon god following the union between
Set and Horus is mentioned in other sources where Thoth is called "son of the two lords" (43).
Although we do not have enough information on ancient Egypt to understand the role homosexuality
played in Egyptian culture, it is certain that homosexual practices were accepted there. The fact that
the documents that refer to it do so in a banal tone shows that it must have been commonplace.
The ancient Israelites
Homosexuality is also attested to in the Hebrew Scriptures, which contain numerous references to
homosexuality among both the Jewish people and their neighbours. Many will probably be surprised to
find that there are strong indications that homosexual practices
were an integral part of early Israelite life too. In fact, the evidence of the Bible shows that the sexual
attitudes and habits of the Israelites were not very different from those of other peoples of the
ancient Near East. A number of biblical passages speak of the
the regular participation of the first Israelites in homosexual cult practices that have been documented
among their neighbours (44).
Moreover, we know that the early Israelites did not prohibit homosexuality at all (45). According to
biblical scholar Louis M. Epstein, "sodomy was not forbidden in the
Epstein adds: "Sexuality is singularly absent from pre-exilic Hebrew preaching. Epstein adds, "Sexuality
is singularly absent from preaching among the pre-exilic Hebrews." (46) It is therefore unlikely
that the first Israelites were less tolerant of homosexual practices than the Egyptians, or than the peoples
of Mesopotamia, from where Abraham is said to have emigrated and where homosexual practices were
more widespread.
homosexuality were common (47). The hostility of the Scriptures towards homosexuality only dates
f r o m after the return from Babylonian exile, towards the end of the sixth century BC.
The cult of the mother goddess and homosexual rituals among the early Israelites
The first Israelites belonged to a Semitic warrior culture similar to that of the tribes of Semitic warriors
who conquered Sumer and founded the Akkadian and Babylonian empires. Originally from the arid
desert regions of the south, the Hebrew tribes, led by a caste of priestswarriors,
invaded Canaan in the second millennium BC and then waged a series o f wars of conquest
to overcome the resistance of the indigenous Canaanites (48). The violence with which the Israelite
invaders subdued the indigenous peoples of Canaan is amply attested by numerous passages in the
Bible, which describe the massacres of the populations that resisted the Israelites.
Israelites (49). Like the other warrior invaders of the Bronze Age, the Hebrews brought with them a
fierce and jealous god of war and sought for several centuries to impose their religion and patriarchal
ideology on the Canaanites, who worshipped a goddess (50). However, from
In the same way, the Indo-European tribes who invaded the Middle East and the Aegean imposed their
male divinities on the conquered peoples, while assimilating a number of rituals from their cult,
the Hebrew tribes absorbed the indigenous Canaanite cults and rituals into their worship, while
continuing to worship Yahweh. As a result, the worship practices of the Hebrews in the period following
the conquest and colonisation of Canaan were particularly polytheistic; the cult of the
Yahweh, the tribal divinity of the Israelites, was mixed with the orgastic rituals associated with the cult
of Asherah, the Canaanite mother goddess, and Baal, her son and companion (51a).
Like the Sumerian goddess Inanna and her husband Dumuzi, the two Canaanite deities controlled the
fertility of livestock and the arrival of rain, essential for good harvests. The animal representation of
Baal was the bull, symbolising the fertilising role he had with the goddess. As we saw above, the
association of the bull with the goddess as part of fertility rituals was widespread.
in the region, dating back to 6500 BC. The bull was also a
symbol of the ancient god of the Hebrews (51b). Some biblical scholars believe that the original god of
the Israelites was Baal and that the cult of Yahweh was largely an extension of the cult of Baal and
developed in reaction to the cult of the goddess, which prevailed in the region (51c). The first
description of Yahweh as an all-powerful warrior god is almost identical to the description of the
goddess of Baal.
description in a Canaanite text of Baal as the god of storms (52). Given the presence of the goddess's
cult throughout the ancient Middle East, it is highly likely that the Israelites of t h e period preceding
their arrival in Canaan heard of the fertility rituals to which Baal was subjected.
goddess and her husband in this region.
In the period before the Israelites arrived in Canaan, Yahweh was known to the Israelites primarily as
an all-powerful warrior god. Yahweh had defeated Pharaoh, parted the waters of the Red Sea and led
the Israelites through the wilderness of Sinai. Yahweh tore down the walls of Jericho, allowing the
Israelites to enter Canaan. He had destroyed the armies of the Philistines and the Canaanites. The
Israelites therefore saw Yahweh as a powerful and formidable protector, who struck down their
enemies and inflicted terrible punishment on those who offended him. However, Yahweh was not
seen as a god who intervened in everyday activities such as agriculture and animal husbandry (53).
Since the conquering Hebrew tribes adopted a farming and herding lifestyle as soon as they settled in
Canaan, it would be natural that they also adopted the fertility and fecundity rituals practised by the
Canaanites. Since they did not believe that the abundance of their crops and the fecundity of their
livestock depended on Yahweh, it would be natural for them to have adopted the fertility and
fecundity rituals practised by the Canaanites.
would seem logical that the newly settled Israelites should have relied on Yahweh to help them
to protect themselves in times of national crisis and turned to the goddess and the fertilising power of
her divine husband to watch over their crops and flocks. There is no doubt that the early Israelites
embraced the fertility rituals associated with the goddess cult after their arrival in Canaan. Numerous
references in the Hebrew Scriptures show that the Israelites' participation in the cult of Baal and
Ashera, with its homosexual rituals and sacred prostitutes, was extensive and continuous. In fact, the
worship of Baal and Asherah persisted among the Israelites for over seven centuries, from the period
following the conquest and settlement in Canaan, which most biblical scholars place at around 1400
BCE, to the time of the destruction of Jerusalem by
Nebuchadnezzar and the deportation of the Israelites to Babylon in the 6th century BC. The
participation of the Israelites in the rituals of the cult of Baal and the goddess is mentioned in the
Hebrew Scriptures as early as the period of the Judges, which immediately followed the Israelite
invasion of Canaan (54). The Scriptural passages also contain a number of references to the
presence in the places of worship of Asherim, images or symbols of Ashera, along with "sacred pillars",
or "Ashera poles", which scholars consider to be phallic symbols, linked to the fertility rites that were
an element of the cult of the goddess in the region (55). The Scriptures frequently describe the Baal
cult in parallel with rituals in honour of Ashera, which is not surprising given the interdependence of
the two deities in protecting crops and the environment.
cattle (56).
The cult of Baal and the goddess became firmly rooted in the lives of the first Israelites after their arrival.
The fact that the Israelites were established in Canaan is reflected in their place names (57) and the
extent of their participation in the rituals of the cult of Baal and Asherah is indicated by the number
of priests who worshipped them. According to 1 Kings 18, during the reign of King Ahab in the ninth
century BC, there were 450 priests of Baal and 450 priests of Asherah among the Israelites, a large
number which implies that a large part of the population provided for their maintenance (58).
According to a recent study, it appears that the Ark of
the Covenant, the most important symbol of the Hebrew religion, did not originally contain the Ten
Commandments, but a bronze statue of a snake, a symbol associated with the goddess throughout the
Hebrew world.
the ancient Middle East (59). According to 2 Kings 18, this statue was worshipped in the Temple in
Jerusalem alongside an image of Asherah and remained there until the time of King Hezekiah, at the
beginning of the 7th century BC.
our era (60).
There is also significant archaeological evidence of the cult of the goddess among the ancient Israelites.
During excavations at Tell Beit Mirsim, near modern-day Hebron, the most important religious artefacts
were found.
Many of the figurines found in the layers dating from the period before the invasion of Canaan were
Ashera ceramic figurines. However, they were also very numerous in the layers dating from later
periods, i.e. the centuries following the invasions when the city was rebuilt by the Israelites. According to
archaeologist Raphaël Patai, "The archaeological evidence leaves no doubt that these figurines were very
popular among the
Hebrews". From an examination of both archaeological and scriptural data, Rabbi Patai concluded that,
until "the end of the Hebrew monarchy [i.e. the time of the Babylonian invasion], the worship of the
ancient Canaanite gods was an integral part of the religion of the Hebrews" (61).
As in neighbouring Mesopotamia, the rituals of the cult of the goddess and her husband involved
the practice of sympathetic magic, deemed necessary to promote the fertility of livestock and crops,
but they were also orgiastic in nature. Copulation with the sacred prostitutes of the
The two sexes, substitutes for the goddess, were intended to impregnate the goddess and thus ensure
the health and growth of the flocks, or to bring about other favourable events. There are eight
references in the Hebrew Scriptures to the Kadesh (62), the temple prostitutes, and to the kadeshem,
their female counterparts and, as we have seen above, in Jerusalem the kadesh were housed in a
building.
which was not razed to the ground until the end of the seventh century BC, during the reign of King
Josiah (640-609 BC) (63). A ritual involving masturbation in front of the idol of Baal was practised to
sexually excite the god and thus encourage him to bring rain, which would make Mother Earth fertile.
There were also rituals to initiate young men into "the sexual and religious exaltation of Baal".
orgasm" in the temple and ceremonies during which the priests had oral and genital contact with the
faithful. These ceremonies have survived to the present day in some Orthodox circumcision rituals,
which include ritual fellatio of the penis (64).
The majority of followers of the cult of Baal and Ashera appear to have been women. As well as
contributing to the fertility of the fields and the fecundity of livestock, the goddess was the patron
saint of childbirth. As such, she was a source of comfort to pregnant women.
faced the trials of childbirth, a process in which they could lose their lives. In Jeremiah 44, when the
prophet preaches before a crowd of men and their wives, predicting the destruction that awaits
those who worship "the Queen of Heaven", a reference to the goddess, the Scriptures
affirm that his message was addressed "particularly to all women" (65). Among the women followers
of Baal and Ashera were undoubtedly agricultural workers on rural farms, but t h e r e were also
some women of high rank. Maacah, the mother of the Judean king Asa, is denounced in 1 Kings 15:13
for erecting an asherim for Asherah.
Contrary to the widespread hypothesis that the Israelites repeatedly abandoned Yahweh for the worship
of Ashera and Baal, an impression favoured by statements in the Scriptures, it is clear that the worship of
the goddess and her husband and the worship of Yahweh coexisted for many years.
many centuries. The coexistence of the cult of the goddess and her husband with rituals in honour of
Yahweh is well illustrated by the aforementioned cult of the bronze serpent in the Temple and by
the aforementioned housing of prostitutes in one of the buildings adjoining the Temple of Jerusalem.
Although the goddess and her husband were worshipped alongside the rituals of the cult of Yahweh for
much of the ancient history of the Israelites, this does not mean that harmony reigned between the two
competing cults. The fierce opposition of Yahweh's priests to the worship of Asherah and Baal is evident
in Scripture (66). The main force of opposition to the cult of
the goddess was the Aaronic priesthood of the southern kingdom of Judah, which controlled the
worship of the Temple of Jerusalem, and the Shiloh, or Mushites, priestly clan of the northern
kingdom of Israel, who were the great rivals of Aaron's priests. Despite their bitter rivalry, they had
long held the same contempt for the rituals of the goddess and her husband and considered the
the majority of Israelites to take part in these rituals as a permanent threat to their prestige and
authority.
The historical animosity of the priesthood against the goddess-worship of the Canaanites had its
origins in the long-standing efforts of the Hebrew priestly power to impose its tribal god, Yahweh,
and its patriarchal ideology on the unrepentant goddess-worshippers who were the
Canaanites (67). The anger of the priesthood was undoubtedly aroused by the adoption of the rituals
of the cult of Baal and Ashera by a large part of the Israelite population, which included the
population of the Canaanites.
Canaanites. The historian Christopher Witcombe has pointed out that, in the light of the fight for
making Yahweh the sole god of the Israelites, "much of the Old Testament can be read as a
Yahwist propaganda tract" against the indigenous cults of Baal and Ashera. As
As Witcombe observes, "the tactic adopted by the Yahwists in their efforts to defeat Baal
consisted in demonising the cult and portraying Baal as an evil god, a demon hostile to
humanity" (68a). Hence the assimilation of the animal symbols of Baal and Asherah, the bull and
the
The devil took the form of a serpent to trick Eve into eating the forbidden fruit (68b).
It should be noted that the passages condemning, or denigrating, the rites of Baal and Ashera in the
Hebrew Scriptures are found almost exclusively in the books that were written, compiled, edited and
amended by the Aaronite priesthood in the period following the return from Babylonian exile at the
end of the sixth or beginning of the fifth century BC. These books are Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy
and Joshua,
Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings, which all consist of texts written or compiled from earlier
texts by members of the Aaronite clergy, or the priests of Shiloh. According to the
(69), they were compiled and edited in their final form by an Aaronite priest, or a group of Aaronite
priests, in the period following the return from exile. Some biblical scholars believe that their editor was
Ezra (70), Aaron's priest and religious leader of the Israelites after their return from exile.
return from Babylon. This hypothesis would be in line with rabbinic tradition, which states that Ezra
wrote the texts that became the Torah in 440 BC. Shortly after the Torah and the historical books were
brought together in a single work, the Books of Chronicles, which contain
also containing negative references to Baal and Asherah, were added to the kitvei kodesh by an
Aaronite scribe. Most scholars believe that they were written by Jeremiah himself, a Shiloh priest.
There are few references to Baal and Asherah in books that were not written by priests. Five negative
mentions of Baal are made in the Book of Hosea, which contains the writings of the minor prophet
Hosea, a contemporary of Isaiah and Amos. The great prophet Isaiah, who was not a member of the
priesthood, railed against Israel's sins, but only mentioned the Asherah poles three times (71) and
made no reference to Baal. It is interesting to note that Amos, who, like his
contemporary Isaiah, was not a member of the priesthood, but was a farmer and herder of humble
origins, makes no reference to the worship of Baal or Asherah. Amos emphasises the compassion and
The writings of the priesthood focus primarily on obedience to Yahweh and the Law as interpreted by
the priesthood. Priestly writings focus primarily on obedience to Yahweh and the Law a s
interpreted by the priesthood, and the negative consequences for those who deviate f r o m the
Law.
Given that a large part of the Israelite population had been taking part in the rituals of the cult of Baal
and Ashera for many centuries, and that they did so under the authority of the kings of Israel and Judah,
who were in charge of the rituals.
were themselves involved, it is difficult to accept the assertion that the ancient Israelites as a nation
identified themselves solely with the worship of Yahweh and repeatedly fell back i n t o idolatry
because of their moral weakness, just as an unfaithful woman commits adultery, theme
recurring in the books of Scripture written by the priesthood. On the contrary, it is clear that the
religious practices of the Israelites were openly polytheistic for a long period of their early history, with
rituals designed to obtain Yahweh's protection against the Israelites' enemies.
alternating with fertility rituals and homosexual rituals in honour of Baal and Ashera.
The well-documented rivalry between the priesthood of Aaron and that of Shiloh also demonstrates that
religious piety and devotion to Yahweh were not their only concern and that they consciously sought to
eliminate their rivals in order to secure sovereign authority over the Israelites, whether the competitors
had
were priests of Yahweh or another god. In this context, it seems likely that the priesthood presented
the cult of Baal and Asherah in a negative light, the better to highlight the virtue it claimed to embody
by turning the Israelites away from paganism and thus sparing them punishment from Yahweh.
It should also be noted that in most of the passages condemning the worship of Baal and Asherah, it is
women who are accused of turning the Hebrews away from Yahweh (72). As we
as we saw in 1 Kings 11:4, "in the old age of Solomon his wives inclined his heart t o other gods;
and his heart was not wholeheartedly toward the Lord his God, as was the heart of David his father"
(73). The king "erected an altar to Baal in the house of Baal which he built in Samaria" (74a) "and he
made an idol of Astarte" (Ashera) (74b). Because of the strong support it gave to the
As a result of her worship of Baal and Ashera and her opposition to the priests of Yahweh, Jezebel was
reviled b y priestly writers. In fact, her name became synonymous with "wicked or shameless
woman".
(75), or "an evil and manipulative woman" (76). As women played an important role in the worship of
the goddess among the Israelites, they came to be regarded by the priests of Yahweh as weak beings,
prone to sin and to lead men astray.
The priesthood's ongoing campaign to purge the Hebrew cult of the rituals of Baal and Asherah may
also have been spurred by nationalism. Several historians have argued that the Hebrew leadership's
hostility to these cults was less a moral crusade than a nationalistic rejection of native Canaanite
religion in favour of a strictly Hebrew national god (77). The historian David F. Greenberg has observed
that the energetic measures to eradicate the cult of the goddess under the monarchs of Judea were
taken at times when they were asserting Jewish nationalism (78).
It is important to note that, in the many passages containing negative references to Baal and Asherah,
the priests do not consider those rituals in which the kadesh participated to be outrages against
morality. The priests indicate their disapproval of these rituals by the Hebrew term "to-ebah"
("idolatry") (79). Similarly, when the kadesh, a term incorrectly translated as "sodomites
They were finally banished from the temple, and it was, as the Bible says, "a miracle".
Epstein writes, "less for moral reasons than because of the idolatry of their cult" (80). Given the total
absence of any condemnation of homosexuality in the pre-exilic texts and the massive participation of
the Israelites in the rituals of the cult of Asherah and Baal, which included a large number of
homosexual practices, the idea, shared by almost all biblical scholars, that the early Israelites always
and uniformly condemned homosexuality is therefore totally unfounded.
The sin of Sodom
One of the oldest and best-known stories in the Bible is the account of the destruction of Sodom
and Gomorrah by fire. For many centuries, Christians believed that God had inflicted a punishment
on the people of Sodom and its twin city, Gomorrah, because they had
practised homosexuality, which, according to Aquinas, is one of the most serious sins, so serious that
the name of the first city has been used to designate this practice since medieval times. However, the
association o f homosexual practices with the sin of Sodom is just one of the many myths that have
developed around sex and homosexuality since the time of early Christianity. If, as
As biblical scholars have noted, there is absolutely no preaching about sexual morality and no
prohibition of homosexuality in the pre-exilic writings of the Old Testament,
Homosexuality could not have been the sin that caused the destruction of the two cities. In Genesis,
Lot's stay in Sodom and the subsequent destruction of that city would have taken place during the
lifetime o f Abraham, who, according to biblical chronology, would have lived some 1,500 years before
the Babylonian conquest of Israel and the subsequent exile of the Hebrews. The common opinion that
the sin that caused the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah was homosexuality is therefore a
misconception that contradicts the data in the Bible and the traditional interpretation of history in the
Christian and Jewish teachings.
The book of Ezekiel defines the sin of Sodom very differently: "This was the crime of your sister Sodom.
She was proud, she lived in abundance and carefree security, she and her
And she did not support the hand of the poor and needy". (Ezekiel 16: 49). A similar interpretation is
given in Wisdom: "... It was right that they (the sinners) should suffer because of their crimes, for they
had indeed shown cruel hatred towards strangers.
Others of old did not welcome strangers passing through, but they enslaved strangers who were their
benefactors". (Book of Wisdom, 19, 13-14). Similarly, Ecclesiastes 16 says: "
God did not spare the city where Lot dwelt as a stranger, and he hated its inhabitants because of the
insolence of their words (81)." Jesus clearly expresses his own understanding of the sin of Sodom in
several of the Gospels: "But in every city where you enter and are not welcomed, go into the squares
and say, 'Even the dust of your city, which sticks to our feet, we...'".
let us take it away and leave it with you. But know this: the reign of God is drawing near." I declare to you
On the last day, Sodom will be treated better than this city (82). Most scholars, both Jewish and
Christian, traditionally consider that the sin that caused the destruction of Sodom w a s arrogance and
lack of charity, carelessness, inhospitality or cruelty towards strangers or those in need.
Genesis 18 and 19 tell the story of two angels sent by God to Sodom to investigate the
The angels took on human form and arrived in the city. The angels, having taken human form, arrived
at the city and Lot put them up in his house for the night. A crowd gathered round Lot's house and
asked him to let them out, so that they could "
to know". The verb "to know" is used in a number of Old Testament passages in the sense of "to have
sexual relations with" (83). Lot refused, saying:
"... do not think of committing such a great evil. I have two daughters who are still virgins: I will
bring them to you: use them as you please, provided you do not harm these men, for they have
entered my house as if it were a place of safety."
The crowd rejected Lot's plea and, when they tried to break down the door of his house, the
angels blinded them, then asked Lot and his family to flee, after which the city was destroyed.
The passage makes it clear that the destruction of Sodom had less to do with the sexuality of its
inhabitants than with their inhospitable attitude. Lot puts his two virgin daughters at the disposal of
the unruly mob to do with as they please, but demands in return that they leave the two men alone,
"because they have come into my house as into a place of safety". The brutal treatment that the men
of Sodom were about to inflict on the visitors, which many biblical scholars regard as an attempt at
rape, was a flagrant violation of the centuries-old Near Eastern tradition, still alive in much of the Arab
world, of offering food, shelter and protection to travellers whose survival in these arid lands literally
depended on the kindness of its inhabitants. The association of
The introduction of homosexuality as such with the destruction of Sodom came much later in Jewish
history. In fact, several scholars have argued that the sexual elements of the story were not inserted
until relatively recent times (84).
On the other hand, the reaction of the men of Sodom to the arrival of the two angels, who we can
a s s u m e had taken the form of exceptionally handsome young men, shows that the writers of
Genesis were well aware of the homosexual tendencies of the men of Canaan, Sodom and Sodom.
Gomorrah being Canaanite cities. The account in the Book of Judges of a similar episode in the Judean
city of Gaba shows that the authors of the Bible were also aware that the Hebrews had homosexual
tendencies.
In the story, a traveller and his concubine arrived in Gaba at the end of the day and set up their
litter in the town square to spend the night. An old man approached them and urged them to
to spend the night with him, an invitation which the travellers accepted. Shortly after arriving at the
A crowd of men surrounded the house and asked the host, "Bring out the man who came into your
house, so that we may know him. (Judges, 19:22) The host refused, saying, "No. I will not,
my brethren, do no evil, I pray you; since this man has entered my house, do no evil.
Do not commit this infamy. Behold, I have a virgin daughter and this man has a concubine.
You will dishonour them and do to them as you please. But do not do such an infamous deed to this
man." (Judges, 19:23-24) The men refused the offer and insisted that the traveller be taken out of the
house, which clearly shows that they had tendencies
homosexuals. Had they been normal heterosexuals, whom scholars are convinced were
made up the vast majority of men in biblical times, we might think that they would have
accepted the man's offer to hand over his virgin daughter and the traveller's concubine. In any case,
once they had rejected the offer, the traveller brought them his concubine and they "gave her up".
and they abused her all night until morning, and then they sent her away at dawn." (Judges, 19:25) At
dawn, the traveller went out and found his concubine dead. Outraged by the
the savage treatment that men had inflicted on his concubine, he warned the twelve tribes of Israel of
the crime, who came and destroyed the city (85).
As in the case of the attempted rape of the angels by the men of Sodom, the intention of the
Gaba's men to rape the traveller was considered by the Hebrews to be a flagrant violation of t h e
obligation of kindness and hospitality towards strangers. The old man himself said: "Since this man has
entered my house, do not commit this infamy", a statement almost identical to
that which Lot did to the men of Sodom. While it seems clear that the men of Gaba intended to rape
the traveller, it is certain that the most serious of their offences in the eyes of the Hebrews, apart from
the rape and murder of the concubine, was their violent disregard for the tradition of kindness and
respect for others.
hospitality towards strangers and the needy. At no time were the men of Gaba denounced for wanting
to have homosexual relations with the traveller. The main problem was not the homosexual act they
were about to commit, but the violent and coercive manner in which they intended to commit it.
Rather than showing that the Hebrews disapproved of homosexuality, the episode of the traveller at
Gaba provides proof that the Hebrews of
were aware of the attraction that can exist between two men and were inclined, when the
circumstances were right, to indulge their homosexual tendencies.
Love between heroes: David and Jonathan
Given the absence of any prohibition of homosexual behaviour in the Hebrew Scriptures prior to the time
of the exile, it is not surprising to find evidence of homosexuality in the great
characters in the Bible. The most striking example of a homosexual relationship among the first
Israelites is the relationship described in I and II Samuel between the great Israelite hero David and
Jonathan, son of Saul, the first king of Israel. The claim that David and Jonathan had a sexual relationship
has
has been violently rejected by traditional Jewish and Christian biblical exegetes. However, a careful
reading of the relationship described between these two men in the text, which contains some
the number of references to the sexual nature of their friendship, leaves little room for any other
interpretation o f their relationship.
Saul came to the throne in the 11th century BC, shortly after the Israelites had settled in Canaan. At
that time, they were frequently attacked by neighbouring powers, in particular the Philistines, an Indo-
European warrior people who had settled in Palestine and occupied part of the Judean mountain
region. Saul was a powerful and arrogant warlord whose fiery temper earned him the wrath of
Yahweh. After defeating a neighbouring tribe, he thought he could override Yahweh's order to
exterminate the people and livestock of the defeated enemy and took his king prisoner and captured
the fattest of his sheep and goats. As a result of this act of defiance, he was "rejected" by Yahweh "and
consequently troubled by fits of worry and melancholy. To ease his pain, his servants sought out a good
harp-player, whose sweet music they thought would lift the king's spirits. As a result, David, "a strong
and valiant man, a
warrior, of good speech and a handsome countenance" (1 Samuel 16:18), was brought to the king.
David, who is described in Scripture as exceptionally handsome, entered the king's service; "Saul was
very pleased with him, and he was appointed to bear his weapons" (1 Samuel 16-21). And whenever
the spirit of God troubled Saul, David took up the harp and played (86).
Shortly afterwards, the Israelites gave battle to the Philistines. The great hero of the Philistines,
Goliath, whose size and ferocity struck terror into the ranks of Saul's army, went out every day
from the stronghold and taunted the Israelites, challenging one of them to take him on and try t o
defeat him. David responded to Goliath's challenge and confronted him. He threw a stone at him with
his slingshot and
The stone struck the giant on the forehead and he fell to the ground. David cut off his head with his
sword. At the sight of their
defeated champion, the Philistines fled, pursued by the Israelite army and, in the rout that followed, the
enemy was driven out of the country (87).
David, still holding Goliath's head in his hands, was brought before a stunned Saul. Saul was
accompanied by his son, Jonathan, a warrior hero in his own right, who had previously enabled
the Israelite army to win a major victory over the Philistines. After David and Saul had finished
speaking, the Scriptures say that Jonathan was struck by the beauty of the young hero and that
"Jonathan's soul was attached to David's soul, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul" (1 Samuel
18:1), "...
Jonathan made a covenant with David, because he loved him as his own soul. And he took off his coat,
and gave it to David; and he gave him his clothes, and his sword, and his bow, and his sash (1 Samuel
18:3- 4)" (88). Saul then moved David into the royal palace, where his son also lived. Later Saul said to
himself that he would give his daughter Michal to David in marriage and "said to David, 'Today you will
become my son-in-law by two [of my daughters]'" (89). By this Saul meant that David would be his
son-in-law by two of his daughters.
his children, i.e. David's relationship with his son Jonathan and David's marriage to his daughter
Michal. This implicit recognition by Saul of his son's sexual relationship with David has been
overlooked by most biblical exegetes.
David soon proved to be an outstanding soldier, for "David went and succeeded wherever Saul sent
him; Saul put him in charge of the men of war, and all the people liked him, even Saul's servants" (90).
David's popularity with the people made Saul jealous of him, whom he saw as a threat to his kingship.
Saul turned against David and told Jonathan and his servants that he wanted the young hero killed.
Jonathan, by virtue of his love for David, warned him of the plot and saw to it that he hid himself.
Jonathan told David that he would search his father's heart to find out if he really wanted to kill him,
and that he would arrange to meet him in a secret place to tell him w h a t he had discovered.
One evening at table, Saul saw David's place unoccupied and asked where he was. Jonathan, for
to protect his friend, told his father that David had had to return home to Bethlehem to take part in a
family sacrifice. Saul did not believe his son and became angry with him: "Perverted and rebellious
son, do I not know that you have for a friend the son of Isaiah, to your shame and to the shame of your
mother? For as long as the son of Isaiah lives on earth, there will be no security for you or for your
kingdom. And
now send for him, and let him be brought to me, for he is worthy of death. (1 Samuel 20:31) And he
rose from the table in fierce anger, and did not partake of the meal on the second day of the new
moon; for he was grieved because of David, for his father had reproached him." (1 Samuel 20-34) (91).
Jonathan found David in his hiding place and told him that he had to flee. On the point of having to
separate, "(t)he two friends embraced each other and wept together" (92).
So David fled from Saul's house, became an outlaw for a while and then took refuge on the
Philistine territory, where he learned that Saul and Jonathan had fallen on the battlefield. David
mourned the death of his friend and lamented: "Jonathan, my brother, I love you so much! Your
friendship was more wonderful to me than the love of women (93). The words David chose to express
his feelings for Jonathan are strikingly similar to the description of Gilgamesh's love for Enkidu. Before
meeting Enkidu, Gilgamesh makes love in his dreams to Enkidu's symbols "(c)omme comme on se
pencher sur une femme". After the death of his friend, Gilgamesh, "like a widower, mourns Enkidu" and
"veils his dead friend as a wife would" (94).
It has of course been argued that two men can have shared a great friendship without being
homosexuals. However, given what we know about attitudes to homosexuality in Eastern cultures
during this period, it is clear that the relationship between David and Jonathan as described went
beyond the bonds of ordinary friendship. Firstly, i n ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, as we have
seen, it was not unusual for virile men to
to have sexual relations; consequently, it would have been in accordance with the sexual practices
in force in the region at the time for Jonathan and David to have had a relationship of a sexual
nature.
Secondly, since homosexuality is not prohibited in the pre-exilic writings of the Bible, there were no
moral obstacles to a sexual relationship between the two men.
Thirdly, the dramatic intensity of the language used in the text to describe the birth of
their relationship ("Jonathan's soul was joined to David's soul, and Jonathan loved him as his own
soul") is a clear reference to homosexual love. Fourthly, the singular nature of
The love between the two men is displayed unambiguously by Jonathan, when he ostentatiously gives
David his own clothes and armour, to say nothing of the eternal covenant they swear to each other.
Indeed, the Hebrew word used in the text to express this "
covenant" is the same word used elsewhere in the Scriptures to designate a marriage agreement
(95). Similarly, David's use of the word "brother" in his famous complaint to Jonathan is a gentle word
that spouses or lovers use to address each other in Scripture (96). What also suggests the existence of
a marital, or "family", relationship between David and Jonathan is the fact that David takes Jonathan's
son into his home when Jonathan dies and says that he has
for Jonathan's sake" (97). Finally, Saul's sarcastic offer to David to become his son-in-law "by two (of his
children)", by marrying Michal, is an explicit recognition of a sexual bond - equivalent to marriage, in
Saul's eyes - between David and Jonathan.
Saul's outburst of anger (1 Samuel 20:30) also betrays the true nature of the relationship between
Jonathan and David, although this is not clear from modern translations of the Bible. In the King James
Bible Saul says, "Do I not know that thou hast chosen the son of Jesse to thy shame and to the shame
of thy mother's nakedness?" (98) The Hebrew word which is translated there as "chosen" and in the
Jerusalem Bible as "colluded with" can also be rendered as "sided with",
"t'es lié d'amitié avec" and "es un camarade de". However, the Septuagint is the oldest version,
renders the word as "metecho", "partner" or "companion". The great Oxford biblical scholar Samuel
Rolles Driver has concluded that only the Septuagint gives a consistent translation of the passage,
namely: "Do I not know that you are an intimate companion of the son of Isaiah?"
In the same way, the Vulgate of St Jerome translates the term as "diligo", "to love", or "to cherish",
and it is this version that Ronald Knox used to translate the passage as follows: "Do you think that I
haven't noticed how much you love this son of Jesse, for your loss and for hers, the shameful mother
who nursed you (98 [numbering error (N.d.E.))."
Saul "s accusation of homosexuality is reinforced by the last part of the sentence, "to the shame of your
mother "s nakedness." The words "shame" and "nakedness" in the passage are pejorative allusions to
sexuality that appear frequently in the Old Testament. The fact that Saul
employs indicates that the intimate camaraderie to which he refers between David and Jonathan is of a
sexual nature. "Shame" and "nakedness", in Semitic languages, are pejorative euphemisms that refer to
the sexuality of a person, or a group of people, without having to do directly with their sexuality.
reference to this person or group (99). What is more, in the same passage, David, the object of Saul's
hatred, is not named, but is referred to indirectly as "Jesse's son". The passage therefore leaves no
doubt that Saul is referring to a sexual relationship between Jonathan and David.
If it had only been a Platonic friendship, it would have been absurd for Saul to allude to it in the
presence of his son. But it would have been natural for Saul, in his anger, to draw attention to the
bond between the two men, since this bond would have led his son to give preference to his friend
over his father. And the reason why Saul is angry with Jonathan is made clear: Saul accuses his son of
helping David to flee because of his homosexual relationship with Jonathan.
David. Jonathan's reaction to Saul's admonition - he leaves the table in anger without eating" -
underlines the strength of the emotional ties that bind him to the young hero.
The historian John Boswell has noted that the editors of the Mishnah, compiled during the first
centuries of Christianity, cite Jonathan and David as examples (Talmud, Aboth, 5:16), while they present
the heterosexual passion between Amnon and Tamar, also narrated in 2 Samuel, as transitory.
Boswell argues that the comparison between the two couples seems to imply the recognition of a
physical relationship between David and Jonathan. Indeed, the word used to describe the love between
the
members of both couples is the same throughout the Mishna (100).
Tom Horner argues for a psychological analysis of the relationship between David and Jonathan which
concludes that Jonathan, the royal prince, was the aggressor and the ambitious young David the willing
seducer. The study found that David "responded unreservedly" to Jonathan's advances and that,
although his homosexuality was only temporary, he benefited from it by cementing a close alliance
between himself and the royal family (101). Whatever the circumstances in which it was born and
the reasons for its birth, the relationship between David and Jonathan is a type of love between heroes
that was most likely common among members of the military aristocracy of the ancient Middle
E a s t . As Rabbi Raphaël Patai has written, "(t)he love story between Jonathan, son of King Saul, and
David, the handsome hero, must have given rise to many such loves in the royal courts of all regions of
the Middle East in all periods" (102).
Sexual connotations in the book of Daniel - the Babylonian captivity
Some researchers have suggested that sexual desire was no stranger to the "favour and grace" that
the prophet Daniel found before the "chief eunuch" of Nebuchadnezzar's court (103).
In the past, the men whose title has often been translated as "king's eunuchs" were generally not
castrated, but were more often than not passive homosexuals who indulged in
sexual desires of virile men. The recruitment of homosexual royal officials and servants dates back to the
earliest periods of Mesopotamian civilisation. The castration of
Courtship was first reported among the Assyrians in the fifth century BC by the Greek historian
Herodotus (104). Herodotus mentions this custom just over a century after the death of
Nebuchadnezzar, so it is possible that it existed in Babylon during his reign. Castration
usually involved the removal of the testicles alone, and was often carried out after puberty, so that the
individuals concerned, if deprived of their reproductive faculties, could
have a satisfying sex life. In fact, in the harems of the Islamic world, where they were often employed as
guards, eunuchs were appreciated by the women because, as their ejaculations were not abundant, they
could have prolonged erections (105). Despite the popularity they continued to enjoy in harems in later
times, eunuchs in the ancient Middle East are generally associated with homosexuality. Whether or not
the chief eunuch was emasculated, his
Its sole function, according to tradition, was to satisfy the sexual needs of virile men. So, given the
customs of the time, the fact that a young man found 'favour and grace' in front of a
man tends to indicate that he is having sexual relations with him.
The phenomenon of the castration of boys and men attached to the service of a king, although little
understood by modern Westerners, was a widespread custom towards the end of Antiquity. S i n c e
castrated officials could not have offspring, monarchs had no reason to fear the ambitions of
powerful officials, as long as they were eunuchs. According to
the Greek writer Xenophon, the Persian king Cyrus the Great, who reigned in the 6th century BC, preferred
that his officials be eunuchs, because he believed that only this type of man could b e unfailingly loyal
to him. Xenophon writes that under Cyrus's successor, Darius, the eunuchs acquired vast political
authority and seem to have occupied all the main civil service posts. They were the king's advisers in
the palace and his generals on the battlefield.
(106).
Given the sexual customs of the time, it is not surprising that young eunuchs were often subjected to the
sexual desires of the aristocracy. One of the effects of castration was to slow down the ageing process.
Removal of the testicles considerably reduces testosterone levels, and testosterone is responsible for the
development of hair growth and baldness. The price paid by
Babylon to Darius consisted of a thousand silver talents and 500 castrated boys (107). The harems
of the Persian kings Darius III and Artaxerxes included both concubines and eunuchs. One of
Alexander the Great's lovers was Bagoas, a handsome young Persian eunuch who had previously
been a concubine.
Darius' lover (108).
It is interesting to examine the circumstances in which Daniel appeared at Nebuchadnezzar's court.
After the Babylonians had conquered Jerusalem, the king ordered his chief eunuch "to choose from
among the Israelites a certain number of boys of royal or noble descent. They were to be free of
physical defects, handsome ... fit for the king's service". So Daniel and three other handsome Israelite
captives were attached to the king's service (109). For thousands of years, conquerors throughout
the region had been in the habit of taking handsome young captives into their hands.
service, or to sell them into slavery. One of their main functions was to satisfy the needs
their masters. The Odyssey mentions Phoenician ship captains buying or kidnapping boys and selling
them to wealthy buyers for this purpose (110). The book of Joel refers to the sale of young men as sex
slaves (111). The trafficking of beautiful boys for sexual purposes was widespread in the ancient Middle
East and in the Greco-Roman world, and continued to be so in the Islamic world in modern times. The
fact that the beauty and physical perfection of young men were the two qualities specified by the king
in the selection of the Hebrew prisoners
intended to be bound to his service strongly suggests that the beginning of the Book of Daniel gives
an insight into this ancient sexual custom that was widespread in the region.
It is possible that Daniel and his handsome compatriots became eunuchs to serve at the Babylonian
court. Flavius Josephus, in the 1st century AD, maintained that Daniel had been castrated and
sodomised by Nebuchadnezzar. This scenario is certainly possible, given the practices of t h e time.
David Greenberg has observed that, although Joseph is not always considered a
reliable source, his testimony provides evidence that the castration of courtiers was common in
the empires of the East (112). It has also been argued that the remarkable success of Joseph, the son of
Jacob's position at Pharaoh's court was due to the fact that he was a eunuch and provided sexual
services, first to Potiphar and then to Pharaoh (113).
Jewish hostility to homosexuality after the Babylonian exile
The exile of the Hebrews to Babylon began in 587 BC, when the Babylonian Nebuchadnezzar
conquered and destroyed the city of Jerusalem, razed the Temple to the ground, enslaved the
Jewish people and brought large numbers of Israelites to Babylon. After the Persian monarch Cyrus
the Great had
Overthrowing the Babylonians in 539 BC, he allowed a large contingent of Israelites to return t o their
homeland and helped them rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. The zeal with which the Israelites
continued to observe their religious rites and practices had naturally diminished during the five
decades they had spent in Babylon. The Babylonian rulers had granted the
The Babylonians had given the Israelites a number of rights and allowed them to take part in
Babylonian society, so that some Israelites even came to occupy important positions in the
government. Many Israelites took part in non-Hebrew rituals and marriages between Hebrews and
Babylonians were common. When Cyrus defeated the Babylonians and invited the Hebrews to return
to their homeland, the process of assimilation that had begun in Babylon did not cease on their return
to Canaan.
Once back in Israel, the Israelites found themselves in a land without secure borders and without the
religious and tribal institutions that had united them as a people since their conquest of Canaan. Indeed,
the only thing that still made them a distinct nationality was the worship of their tribal god, Yahweh,
although, as we have seen, this bond had been seriously loosened during their years in Babylon. Many
Israelites returned home married to Babylonian women and continued to participate in the Babylonian
worship of the goddess. As a result of the weakening of traditional Jewish religious practices, the
priesthood must certainly have become more important.
recognise the need to re-establish a Jewish religious order for all Israelites as an indispensable step in
the reaffirmation of national identity. A fundamental step in achieving this goal was the convergence
of the competing strands of the Hebrew religion into a unified Scripture for a unified Jewish people.
At the beginning of the fifth century BC, the Persian king Artaxerxes appointed Ezra, one of Aaron's
priests still in Babylon, as religious leader of the Israelites in Judah and Jerusalem. This momentous
decision was to have a major influence on the development of the Jewish religion. Artaxerxes ordered
Ezra to "inspect Judah and Jerusalem according to the law of your God, which is in your hands" (Ezra
7:14). The king authorised Ezra to draw from the provincial treasury the funds he deemed necessary for
the direction of the cult and the administration of the Jewish religion.
the teaching of the Law to the people, a Law which, Artaxerxes declared, was "the law of the king".
Artaxerxes decreed that "(w)hoever fails to observe punctually the law of your God and the law of the
king shall be condemned to death, banishment, fine, or imprisonment" (114). Aaron's priesthood,
supported by the Persian monarch, thus had free rein to revise the numerous Hebrew religious texts
and bring them together in the work that came to be known as the Old Testament (115).
The compilation and editing of religious texts by the Aaronites took place at a crucial time in the history
of the Jewish people. The trauma of their Babylonian captivity, during which the identity of the Hebrews
as a people had almost dissolved, had a profound effect on the religious concerns and attitudes of the
Israelites as they set about rebuilding their society in Israel.
The religious precepts compiled during and after the Babylonian captivity under the leadership of
Aaron's priesthood and the resulting social organisation made it possible to reconcile the main
elements of the Judaic religion as it has been known ever since and to integrate the Twelve Tribes of
Israel into a single Jewish people.
The Israelites were no longer the same people once they returned to their homeland. Long accustomed
to an almost insular lifestyle of farming and herding, many of them had been uprooted
by the disastrous upheavals caused by the Assyrian invasion of the northern kingdom. The
The subsequent cataclysm of the Babylonian invasion and Babylonian exile turned the vast majority o f
Israelites away from farming and animal husbandry. By necessity, they became a nation of artisans and
merchants dependent on trade with foreign nations. The Jews were no longer the confident heirs of
Abraham, certain of their rights to the Promised Land, but saw themselves as a small part of a much
larger world of more powerful nations, subject to wars
of invasion and living under the ever-present threat of subjugation.
The constraints and uncertainties of their new situation led them to adopt a pessimistic view of the
world and of material things, in which "man was conceived as a mere object.
a weak, powerless creature, heir to the innate evil tendencies of his original father, Adam, constantly
tempted and irresistibly attracted by evil, personified by Satan" (116). Among the
man's weaknesses, the greatest, according to the priesthood, was the lure of sex, a view that began to
b e expressed frequently in Jewish writings of the post-exilic period. This negative view of sex can be
seen, for example, in the Testament of the patriarch Reuben, who states that sex "leads the young
man like a blind man to a pit and like a beast to a precipice" (117a). Women, already suspect in the
eyes of the priesthood because of their association with the cult of the goddess in the pre-exilic period,
were presented by the post-exilic priesthood as runts and, as temptresses, as the cause of men's moral
weakness (117b). Hence the very negative views expressed about women in post-exilic writings and
the severity of the rules of conduct
which found their place in the codes of law developed in the period following the Assyrian and
Babylonian invasions
The devastation of the kingdom of Israel by the Assyrians, followed by the catastrophe of the Babylonian
captivity,
were interpreted by the priesthood as the punishment Yahweh had inflicted on the Israelites for
not having observed his Law. This was not surprising, since the priestly prophets had repeatedly
predicted that lack of devotion to Yahweh and participation in the worship of Baal and Asherah would
lead to disaster and the destruction of their nation. Because of their pessimistic view of man's moral
frailty - vulnerable to Satan's ever-present temptations - and of the dangers represented by the lures of
sexuality, the priesthood persuaded themselves that only adherence to a strict and ascetic moral code
could secure God's protection for Israel (118). The most
obvious to the Law in the eyes of the priesthood was, of course, the continued participation of many
Jews in the worship of Baal and Ashera, in which homosexual rituals played an important part.
The vulnerability of the Israelites as a people, the urgent need to control man's sinful nature in order to
secure Yahweh's protection for him, the Hebrews' disaffection with their own people, and the fact that
Yahweh's protection was not a matter of course.
traditional religious practices and the persistence of the cult of the goddess among the people were
The priesthood must have been well aware of these factors when it set about compiling and editing
the various original documents into a single text. The main task that the Aaronite editors set
themselves was to purify Hebrew religious practices, firstly by defining the ritual and behavioural
norms that distinguished the Hebrews from other peoples by virtue of their status as Yahweh's chosen
people, and then by banning once and for all the rituals of goddess worship and the religious practices
of neighbouring peoples that many Israelites still indulged in.
The code of religious and behavioural norms they wrote is to be found mainly in the book of Leviticus,
named after the priestly tribe of the Aaronites, the Levites, and which is the only book of the Torah
entirely composed after the exile. A number of historians have concluded that the rules
The strict regulations on dress, food and behaviour contained in the Book of Leviticus represented an
attempt to restore a Hebrew religion and national identity by distinguishing the religion and practices of
the Hebrews from those of their neighbours (119). Among its restrictions are two provisions prohibiting
male homosexuality. The first
is translated as follows in the modern versions of the Bible: "Thou shalt not lie with a man as with a
woman; it is an abomination. It is an abomination. (Leviticus, 18:22,). Leviticus 20:13 reiterates this
prohibition and specifies the punishment for those who transgress it: "They shall be put t o death;
their blood shall be on them.
Many consider the condemnation of male homosexuality in Leviticus to be pure and simple, like the
commandments of Moses. However, the origin and context of the provisions and the choice of words
used clearly show that their original intention had more to do with the
The first objective was to purge the Jewish cult of its foreign elements, mainly the rituals of Baal and
Ashera. Indeed, Leviticus 18 begins and ends with exhortations against the practices of the Egyptians
and Canaanites, implying that the forbidden practices listed in the chapter, which include the
injunction against male homosexuality, are those of these neighbouring peoples.
The religious practices of their neighbours which the Israelites disapproved of and which
concerned the priests of Yahweh obviously included the worship of the goddess, which at that
time consisted of
including sacrificing pigs and practising homosexual rituals. As a result, the writers of Leviticus issued
prohibitions against the consumption of pork and against homosexuality, a common practice among
the Israelites' neighbours and, in general, an essential element of the cult of the goddess
(120).
Although Christians and Jews today read Leviticus 18:22 as a c l e a r - c u t injunction such as "Thou
shalt not kill", the Hebrew text has a very different meaning. The word rendered as 'abomination' in
modern Christian and Jewish translations is 'to-ebah', 'unclean', '...'.
ritually impure" or "idolatrous". This expression has its origins in the Egyptian word translated as
"holy" or "sacred", which the priests of Yahweh appropriated and then gave a negative meaning to
in their condemnation of rites and practices that were holy or sacred to them.
non-Hebrews and whom the priests of Yahweh considered to be idolaters (121). The meaning of the
word is clear in the expression "to-ebah ha goyem", "the impurity of the Gentiles". The term is used one
hundred and sixteen times
in the Old Testament, almost always in reference to idolatry. For example, when the people of Judah are
denounced as idolaters in I Kings 14, to-ebah is used in verse 24 in reference to the homosexual rites of
the kadesh, the sacred prostitutes associated with goddess worship alluded to in verse 23. On the other
hand, in its condemnation of classical prostitution, a
a strictly sexual offence, Leviticus 19:29 uses a different term, "zimah" (122).
A second shortcoming of modern translations of the Bible is their inability to render exactly the
meaning of the Hebrew words used to designate one or other of the disapproved sexual acts. The
modern translation of the word for sexual act in the verse "Thou shalt not lie with a man
as one lies with a woman" is imprecise and misleading. The forbidden act is indicated by the words
"miskebe issa", a highly unusual and indeed unique construction in the Hebrew Scriptures. However, a
similar expression - "miskab zakar" (literally, "to lie with a man") - appears in a number of passages to
designate the introduction of the penis into the vagina.
(Genesis, 20:15-16; Exodus, 22:15; Numbers, 31:17, 18, 35; Judges, 21:12). Because the word issa
means "woman", a number of researchers have concluded that the expression "miskebe issa" could be
translated as "to sleep with a woman" (123), or "to take on the role of the woman or the
receptacle in sexual intercourse". If the intention of the authors of the Scriptures had been to forbid a
man from sodomising another man, they could have used the common expression "to lie with a man"
instead of a very unusual expression which occurs nowhere else in the Hebrew Scriptures (124). The
stigmatisation of passive homosexuality by the Aaronite authors of Leviticus can be explained by their
animosity towards the sacred prostitutes, the kadesh, who
performed this sexual act as part of the rituals of the cult of the goddess (125). The impression that the
provision is directed against sacred prostitutes is reinforced by the fact that the term used to designate
the man with whom the act is performed is 'zakar', instead of 'ish', the term most commonly used to
refer to a man. While the term 'zakar' can refer to a man, it is mainly used to refer to men performing
sacred functions, such as priests, or men consecrated to Yahweh in some way. It is used in Deuteronomy,
20:13 to refer to the Canaanites who bring down the Israelite priests or religious officials in
idolatry and is even used twice (Deuteronomy 4:16 and Ezekiel 16:17) to refer to male pagan idols.
The word "ish", which refers to men in ordinary, non-religious contexts, appears more than two
thousand times in Scripture, while "zakar" is used only once.
occurs only eighty-six times. When we consider 1) the cultic or sacred connotations of the term "zakar", the
man with whom the act is performed, 2) the fact that what is forbidden for a
man's role in sexual relations, 3) the historical animosity of the priesthood towards goddess worship
and its homosexual servants, and 4) the religious connotations of the word "to-ebah" and its use in
other passages of Scripture to condemn idolatry, it is difficult not to conclude that in this verse the
writers of the text were aiming at the kadesh (126).
The warnings against the idolatrous practices of the Canaanites and Egyptians in the preamble and
conclusion of Leviticus, 18 and the use of religious vocabulary to pronounce the prohibition against a
man taking the passive role in sexual intercourse clearly indicate that conformity to the
religious and ethnic norms and not the regulation of sexual behaviour was the main purpose of the
provision (127). Jewish biblical scholar Louis Epstein has shown that the expulsion of t h e kadesh
temple, whose activities are also described as "to-ebah", "was due less to
considerations of sexual morality than to the idolatry in which they indulged" (128). The Jewish moral
treatises of the period following the exile repeatedly establish a link between relationships
homosexuality and the practice of idolatry (129).
The derivation of the word "to-ebah" from the Egyptian word for "sacred" or "holy", which underlines
the religious connotation of the expression, in fact calls into question the translation of "to-ebah" by
the word "abomination". The 2006 edition of the Random House Unabridged Dictionary defines
"abomination" as follows
as "1. an abominable thing. something deeply hated or abhorred; 2. intense aversion or disgust; 3. vile,
shameful, or detestable state, habit, etc.: spitting in public is an abomination". The
The word has nothing to do with idolatry or the practices of a foreign cult. Rather, it refers to a practice
that provokes an intense reaction in a person, a reaction of horror, aversion or disgust. It is therefore
clear that it is inappropriate to use the word "abomination", which refers to a visceral reaction of
aversion or disgust, to render the Hebrew religious term "to-ebah", used in many passages of the
Hebrew Scriptures to designate the worship of foreign gods or idolatry.
The prohibition of homosexuality in Leviticus is just one element of a code that also forbade men to
cut their hair and beards, to wear clothes made of two kinds of cloth, to eat shellfish, etc. These
restrictions were specific to Hebrew culture at the time, and they are still in force today. These
restrictions were specific to the Hebrew culture of the time, and
were clearly intended to distinguish Jewish rituals and ethnic practices from those of other peoples in
the region. It is doubtful that the provisions prohibiting homosexuality were applied to the letter.
Although the Code prescribed the death penalty for those who violated the ban on homosexuality, it is
telling that there is absolutely no evidence that any man was ever executed for homosexuality (130).
After the conquests of Alexander the Great in the 4th century BC and the spread of Greek culture
throughout the Near East, the Israelites were once again influenced by the customs of the Greeks.
religious and social customs, including those of the Greeks, among whom homosexuality was
widespread. Just as many Israelites had adopted Babylonian customs during the exile, so at
In the Hellenistic period, many Jews began to ignore the sexual and ritual prohibitions of the Torah and
offered sacrifices to the Greek gods. According to 1 Maccabees 15, a gymnasium was even built in
Jerusalem "according to the customs of the nations" - i.e. according to the customs of the Greeks and
therefore frequented by naked athletes - customs that were reprobated by the pious Jews. The Jews
"made
and so, separating themselves from the holy covenant, they joined the nations and sold themselves to
sin" (ibid., 16) and "defiled themselves with all kinds o f impurity and profanation" (131), implying a
general disregard for the sexual injunctions o f Leviticus. This, of course, provoked a severe reaction
from the priesthood and, indeed, Jewish writers of the period were particularly vociferous in
denouncing the sexual idolatry of the Greek conquerors. As the homosexual customs of the Greeks
became the target of the priesthood's condemnations in place of the passive homosexuality of the
prostitutes in the service of the
The Levitical injunction forbidding men to play a passive role in homosexual relations began to apply to
all homosexual acts.
James W. Neill, The Origins and Role of Same-Sex Relations in Human Societies, McFarland & Company,
Inc, Publishers, Jefferson, NC - London, 2009, chap. IV: "Same-Sex Behavior at the Dawn of Civilization
"translated and trimmed (*) from the American by B. K.
(*) The work is so poorly written, so full of repetitions and confused developments, that it had to be
reworked to make the text more intelligible - and, even though we know that publishing houses'
criteria have become lax, we wonder how it could have been published as it is.
(i) It would seem that homosexuality in animals is caused, at least in part, by "a numerical
imbalance between males and females", which leads "individuals of the majority sex to become
aroused with each other in the absence of sufficient partners of the other sex" (Pascal Picq and
Philippe Brenot, Le Sexe, l'Homme et l'Évolution, Odile Jacob, Paris, 2009, p. 201).
(ii) See "Ancient American's genome mapped, bbc.com," February 13,
2014, http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-26172174.
(iii) Nicholas Wade, "Ancient Man in Greenland Has Genome Decoded", 10 February
2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/11/science/11genome.html.
(iv) It is not true that "prehistoric figurines from Siberia are not Venuses...".
(http://www.hominides.com/html/actualites/statuette-siberie-pas-vraiment-venus-prehistoriques-
1012.php) because, as shown by a much more complete sample of photos of the statuettes unearthed
on the Mal'ta and Buret sites (to download the PDF file in question, go to
following search: "Venus Russia and Siberia = MVRS - paleoscope"), some of them have the same
anatomical characteristics as those of the Palaeolithic "Venuses".
These include steatopygia and exaggerated development of the abdomen, hips, breasts and vulva.
(iv bis) Admittedly, "... it would be simplistic to assume that the pre-eminent position held by
goddesses in a given society reflects the status of women in that society" (Hennie J. Marsman, Women
in Ugarit and Israel, Brill, Leiden, 2003, p. 44). But it is even more simplistic to assume that a woman's
status in a given society accurately reflects the power she actually wields in that society,
power which, as Chinweizu has brilliantly highlighted, is not of the same nature as male power and
which, for this reason, goes unnoticed by men. On the other hand, whatever the
The status of women in a society whose members worship a mother goddess may be male, but
political power is exercised on the basis of the chthonic forces and feminine values that underpin the
cult of the mother goddess.
(v) Ida Magli and Ginevra Conti Odorisio, Matriarchat et/ou pouvoir des femmes, Des femmes,
1983; Glimpses of Micronesia, vol. 24: "Glimpses of Guam", Incorporated, 1984.
(vi) Jan Herman Ronhaar, Woman in Primitive Motherright Societies, J. B. Wolters, 1931, p. 54.
(vii) The myth of one of them, known as Mimia-Abere, is worth recounting: "She seduced many men.
She seduced Badabada in a boat, made his nose stick fall into
She plunged him into the water and tried to kill him with her paddle when he resurfaced. Still alive, he
set off in pursuit, but she grew a weed (mania) so dense around her that no one could see her.
find. She is usually depicted in the company of her adopted daughters, with whom she catches crabs. She
is the mother of the north-west wind (the monsoon). She killed all those who lived
on her island, except for her adopted daughters. She took off her grass skirt, threw it away and a
banana tree grew where the skirt had fallen. Her daughters were then transformed into ants. The
headless body of one of the girls became a drum. One day, Abere had sex in a boat, the pitch of which
made the sea rough. Later, the man washed his penis in the sea, which has remained muddy e v e r
since near Kiwai. Abere and her daughters shared a lover called Mesede, who killed the crocodile that
had killed Abere's son. Abere and her daughters braided Mesede's hair using mud, and then they all
had sex in secret in the men's place of worship" (see Gilbert H. Herdt
(ed.), Ritualized Homosexuality in Melanesia, University of California Press, Berkeley - Los Angeles -
London, 1993).
(viii) James W. Neil, p. 81-114.
(ix) A growing number of researchers," argues James W. Neill (p. 117), "now believe that, among the
first Indo-European tribes, the training of a young person in hunting and warfare, which did
part of an initiation process, took place in the context of a homosexual relationship between the young
man and a warrior, and that this tradition dated back to the Neolithic period", the references he
provides in this respect (see p. 444, note 9) do not, however, concern the first Indo-European peoples,
but certain of their branches, such as the Celts, the Germans, the Scandinavians and, of course, the
Greeks and the Romans.
Romans.
Let's take a look.
As regards the Germanic peoples, the author does not hesitate to state that "homosexuality in t h e
form of institutionalised pederasty... is considered to have been the rule in (their)
warrior societies" (p. 121). Indeed, "Historians also have evidence of homosexual practices among the
Heruli... a Germanic tribe. This evidence comes from the Byzantine author Procopius, the great
historian of Justinian's reign, who was born at the end of the fifth century in Caesarea, Palestine. As
secretary to the Byzantine general Belisarius, he followed him on his campaigns and witnessed the
events he recounted in his Histories. In his account of the war against the Goths in Italy, he shows that
there was a distinction between masters and young people, whom he calls doüloi, literally "slaves". In
his account, he explains that young people had to show their courage to be considered as "slaves".
men. Specialists have shown that the use of the term "slave" is not insignificant, and is characteristic
of the development of male societies. As we have seen, the Herules practised a form of initiation, and
anthropologists consider the hypothesis that the
pederasty would be an integral part of the rites. By extension, after having proved that the Heruli
refer, at many stages of their lives, to the old foundations of Indo-European traditions, specialists
believe that it is credible to think that the same was true, at the time, for the other peoples of the
world.
Germanic peoples from Sweden such as the Ruges, the Gepids, the Vandals and the Burgundians". And
the "evidence" just keeps piling up, because "the most interesting thing about studying ancient
homosexual practices in Germanic societies is how they were treated, depending on whether the
person was passive or active. Passive homosexuals were very much frowned upon in these societies:
eromenes were despised, their
social status is considered inferior until they become adults. If he has the misfortune to
Once they have entered the adult world, they remain passive and their fate is sealed. Tacitus provides
proof of this in a first-century text describing the customs of the Germans: "Traitors and defectors are
hanged from trees; cowards, cowards, people of infamous morals [corpore infamis] are sunk in the
mud of a marsh with a rag thrown over their bodies. What the anthropologists explain is that "people
of infamous morals" are certainly homosexuals, but more precisely people who are "infamous because
of their homosexuality".
their bodies', those whose bodies were soiled, in other words passive homosexuals". (Thomas Rozec, Le IIIe
Reich et les homosexuels, 2011, p. 15-16). On the basis of this "evidence", Bernard Sergent speaks of
"widespread homosexuality in former Germanic society..." We will leave the final word to David F.
Greenberg (op. cit., p. 246) who, in a note on the same page as the one on which he writes
asserts "that it was in these warrior societies (Männerbünde) that pederasty was practised. It is
reasonable to infer that it had antecedents in the ritualised pederasty of archaic Greece.
"He concludes: "The sources do not mention homosexuality in the Männerbünde, only sexual licence,
hunting, fighting and rapine...". (*)
Then there is the testimony of Ammianus Marcellinus (31, 9) on the subject of "the unworthy race of
the Taifals", among whom, "it is said (the testimony is indirect), custom compels adolescents to
prostitute the flower of their youth to the pleasures of made men, and that no one among them can
redeem himself from this immoral servitude until he has taken, unaided, a wild boar while hunting, or
brought down, with his own hands, a bear of great size". However, "(t)he constantly repeated
assertion that the Taifali were a Germanic people is completely unfounded" (Otto J. Maenchen-
Helfen, The World of the Huns: Studies in Their History and Culture, University of California Press,
berkeley, 1973, p. 26). It should be noted that the Taifali, after accompanying the Huns to Thrace and
later fighting and serving the Roman armies and then the Merovingian armies, settled in Aquitaine
(L'Europe héritière de l'Espagne wisigothique, colloque international du C.N.R.S. held at the Fondation
Singer-Polignac [Paris, 14-16 May 1990], proceedings compiled and prepared by Jacques Fontaine and
Christine Pellistrandi, published with the support of the Fondation Singer-Polignac, Madrid, Casa de
Velazquez, Collection de la Casa de Velazquez.
Velazquez, 1992, p. 110) and in Poitou (Charles Athanase Walckenaer, Géographie ancienne
historique et comparée des Gaules cisalpine et transalpine, vol. 2, Paris, 1839, p. 454), from the end
of the fourth century they did so in the vicinity of the Sarmatians, to whom they were related and
whose
ancient observers were struck by the eminent status of women in their society
(Yaroslav Lebedynsky, Les Sarmates: amazones et lanciers cuirassés entre Oural et Danube, VIIe siècle
av. J.-C. -VIe siècle apr. J.-C., Ed. Errance, DL, 2002).
Scythians, some of whose Mongoloid features are evidence of interbreeding (Ellis Hovell Minns,
Scythians and Greeks, Cambridge University Press, 2011, p. 47).
According to Anne Ross ("Celtic and Northern Art" [pp. 77-106]. In Philip Rawson (ed.), Primitive Erotic Art,
G.P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1973), one of the cave paintings dating from 1000 BC that
were unearthed at Tanum, in northern Böhuslän on the west coast of Sweden, depicting two men having
anal intercourse. That's all it took for our handful of "historians" to get their hands on it.
find 'proof' of the institutionalisation of male homosexuality in Scandinavia at the time. Others, more
cautiously, point out that "it is possible that these rock engravings had a content
(Timothy L. Taylor, The Prehistory of Sex: Four Million Years of Human Sexual Culture,
Bantam, reprinted 1997, p. 173). In fact, nothing establishes that the petroglyphs in question are the
work of Nordic peoples, and the question of which culture they belong to does not seem to concern
specialists. What's more, the figures that some identify as men are so androgynous that they could
just as easily represent two women (see Riina Hämäläinen, "
Bodies on the Rocks: A Gender Archaeological Approach to the Bronze Age Rock Art of Bohuslän,
Sweden", available at:
https:/ / w w w . a c a d e m i a . e d u / 2 8 1 7 5 6 9 6 / B O D I E S _ O N _ T
H E _ R O C K S _ A _ G e n d e r _ A r c h a e o l o g i c a l _ A p p r o a c h _
to_the_Bronze_Age_Rock_Art_of_Bohuslän_Sweden, accessed on 16 December 2016)
For the sake of completeness, it is worth quoting the following extract from the Book of the Laws of
Nations, a dialogue written in Syriac by a disciple of Bardesanes of Edessa (154 - 222 AD) called Philip,
which was long attributed to this heretical Christian philosopher and whose first copy dates from the
7th century (http://www.uranos.fr/PDF/ETUDES_01B_ND.pdf): "In the north, on the other hand,
among the Germans and their neighbours, well-built young boys are married by men who even make
feasts of
On this occasion, this act does not bring them shame or opprobrium because of their law. - It is
impossible, however, that the horoscope of all those who fall into this disgrace in Gaul should include
Mercury with Venus in the house of Saturn, in the confines of Mars and in the signs
of the zodiac located (then) in the west, for it is written that men born in these conditions will prostitute
themselves like women". (F. Nau, Bardesanes: Le Livre des Lois des Pays, Leroux, 1899). This
This extract calls for two comments, the first of a linguistic nature, the second of a socio-cultural nature.
Firstly, Philippe's characterisation of the attitude of the Orientals of the time towards
homosexuality ("Throughout the East, those who defile themselves and are known [as such] are killed by
their fathers and brothers, the laws of the Orient often do not grant them tombs.
") is so contrary to reality ("Homosexuality was widespread at the time of the Bible and has
remained so in the Middle East up to the present day... it was not at all disapproved of by the
(Raphael Patai, Sex and the Family in the Bible and the Middle East, Doubleday & Co., Garden City,
N.Y., 1959, quoted in Wayne R. Dynes (ed.), Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, vol. 2, Routledge Revivals,
2016, p. 916) that it is doubtful whether an observer so unfamiliar with Eastern mores would have
been more familiar with the customs of 'Westerners'.
This extract, among others, was translated into Greek by Eusebius of Caesarea in his Preparation
Gospel (VI, 10) (Alexander Roberts and Sir James Donaldson, Ante-Nicene Christian Library, vol. 22,
T/ & T. Clark, Edinburgh, 1871, p. 105) and the first sentence is rendered as: "In the north at
On the contrary, in the land of the Gauls and among their neighbours..."; it is also in these terms in the
English translation (Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson and A. Cleveland Coxe, Ante-Nicene Fathers,
vol. 8, Christian Literature Publishing Co., Buffalo, NY, 1886) and in the revision by Kevin Knight,
published at http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0862.htm. Nau curiously states in the corresponding
note: "Messrs Merx and Hilgenfeld (authors of the two German translations of Philippe's work;
respectively, Bardesanes von Edessa; nebst einer Uniersuchung iiber das Verhaeltniss der
Clementinischen Recognitionem zu dem Buche der Gesetze der Laender, Halle, 1863 and Bardesanes
der
letzte Gnostiker, Leipzig, 1864 [N.D.E.]) wondered whether it might not be possible to do away with the
Germans.
in this passage. - We believe that they appear there in the same way as the Gauls". "We believe"?
Clearly, there are problems with the translation of the corresponding Syriac word.
Turning specifically to the Gauls, two accounts from the 1st century BC confirm that
the existence of homosexuality among them. The first is by Diodorus of Sicily (Universal History, V, 21)
Although women are perfectly beautiful, they rarely live with them, but they are extremely devoted
to criminal love of the other sex and lie on the ground on animal skins.
Often they are not ashamed to have two young boys at their side. But the strangest thing is that,
with no regard for the laws of modesty, they prostitute themselves w i t h incredible ease. Far from
finding viciousness in this infamous trade, they believe themselves to be
dishonoured if the favours they offer are refused". The second, second hand, is from Strabo, (III, 4,6):
"if a widespread rumour is to be believed, all the Gauls are in a quarrelsome mood; they
I can assure you that they attach no shame to boys prostituting the flower of their youth.
As far as the "Celts" are concerned, things are different. In the fourth century BC, Aristotle (Politics, II, VI,
7) explained that "along with a few other nations, the Celts", he said, "openly honoured virile love. It is a
very true idea that of the mythologist who first imagined the union of Mars and Venus; for all warriors
are naturally inclined to love one sex or the other. But let us quote the paragraph from Politics in its
entirety: "The relaxation of laws
Lacedaemonian attitudes towards women are contrary to both the spirit of the constitution and the
good order of the State. The man and the woman, both elements of the family, also form, one might
say, the two parts of the State: here the men, there the women; so that, wherever the constitution has
badly regulated the position of women, it must be said that half the State is without laws. This can be
seen in Sparta: the legislator, in demanding temperance and firmness from all the members of his
republic, has
gloriously successful with men; but it has failed completely with women, whose
life is spent in all the excesses of luxury. The necessary consequence is that, under such a regime,
money must be given great honour, especially when men are inclined to allow themselves to be
dominated by women, which is the usual disposition of energetic and warlike races. I would, however,
exclude the Celts and a few other nations who, it is said, openly honour virile love. It is a very true
idea, that of the mythologist who first imagined the union of Mars and Venus; for all warriors are
naturally inclined to love one sex or the other. As
As F. Nau rightly points out (op. cit., p. 49), Aristotle attributes pederasty "to the Celts, by virtue of a
rigorous syllogism: Warriors, he says, are inclined to trade with women and men, and the Celts are
warriors, therefore...". There is certainly some truth in this remark.
At the end of the 2nd century AD, Athenaeus of Naucratis (Deipnosophists, XIII, 79) presents
homosexuality as a general practice among the "Celts" and a fact of public notoriety: "It is known that,
among the barbarians, the Celts, who possess magnificent women, have a
preference for boys, so that many of them sleep with two cute boys at the same time on their beds
made of animal skins". At least that's how the translator presents it. "The first translator of the work
into French was already less general about it: "Among the barbarians, the Celts, a l t h o u g h they
had very beautiful women, were nonetheless more attracted to the love of boys; & et
in such a way that some of them often slept on stuffed skins, which they used for their
served as beds, with two young innocents" (Les quinze livres des Déipnosophistes, 1680, p. 896). The
English translation (in Peter Berresford Ellis, Celtic Women: Women in Celtic Society and Literature,
William B. Eerdmans Pub. Co. 1996, p. 125) also says "some" (is Naucratis reliable?). Certainly, at least
one of the other anecdotes he tells about the sex lives of great people is open to question: "King
Alexander," he writes, "was also a great lover of handsome boys. In his book on the sacrifice at Ilion,
Dicéarchos even admits that he was so infatuated with the eunuch Bagoas that, in the middle of a
theatrical performance, he leaned over and kissed him.
The spectators immediately clapped their hands in approval, which prompted the king to kiss Bogoas
again". (XIII, 80) In fact, the following account by Plutarch
(On the Fortune of Alexander, I, 12) runs counter to Naucratis' portrait of the king of Macedonia:
"... one day when Philoxenus, head of the coastal troops, had written to him that there was a young
boy in Ionia who was charming and handsome like no other, and had asked him if he should be sent
for him, Alexander... replied sternly: "O most corrupt of men, what abominable deed do you think I
am guilty of, you who want to seduce me by offering me such voluptuous pleasures?)
Who were the 'Celts' alluded to by the Greek scholar and grammarian? Quite simply, who
Who were the 'Celts'? This question has been asked ever since Celtic studies took off in the last
quarter of the nineteenth century, and it remains unanswered. It is inextricable. For our purposes, it
will suffice to recall a few essential points (so as not to complicate matters further, we have left aside
the terminological aspect of the question, which has given rise to an abundant literature on the
respective uses of the words "Κελτοί", "Γαλάται" and "Celtae"). Firstly, with the exception of the 1st
century BC, when Latin authors restricted it, the use of the term keltoi has continued to expand. The
first instance of the term is found in
the Greek author Hecataeus of Millet (549 - 475 BC), for whom it refers exclusively to peoples settled
in south-eastern Gaul, more specifically on the outskirts of the Greek colony of Massalia (Marseille). In
the fifth century, Herodotus (Histories, II, 33) attributed their origins to the region where the
Danube has its source ("The Ister in fact begins in the land of the Celts, near the town of
Pyrenees, and crosses Europe in the middle") and the coast of southern Spain ("The Celts are beyond
the columns of Hercules, and touch the Cynesians, who are the last peoples of Europe on the west
side. The Ister flows into the Pont-Euxin where the Istrians are, a colony of Miletus"), a contradiction
that can be resolved without having to postulate that the Greek author confused the name "Pyrenees"
with "Pyrenees", since, as Camille Jullian points out ("Les Celtes
chez Hérodote". Revue des Études Anciennes, vol. 7, n° 4, 1905, p. 375-392), the Cynesians are also
thought to have populated the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts of Gaul (C. J. V. Darttey,
Recherches sur l'origine des peuples du nord et de l'occident de l'Europe, H. Cousin, Paris, 1839, p.
4). From the fourth century BC onwards, the Greeks, perhaps under the influence of Ephorus of
Cumae (400-330 BC), began to develop their own language and culture.
ère) (Jean-Louis Brunaux, Les Celtes : Histoire d'un mythe, Belin, 2014, p. 284), for whom the Keltoi
were, along with the Persians, the Scythians and the Libyans (T.G.E. Powell, The Celts, Thames and
Hudson, 1958, p. 17), one of the four great barbarian peoples of the world known to the Greeks, took
the habit of referring to the Keltoi as the "Celts" (Jean-Louis Brunaux, Les Celtes : Histoire d'un mythe,
Belin, 2014, p. 284).
under the generic name of Keltoi all the peoples of western and central Europe (Sarunas Milisauskas,
European Prehistory: A Survey, Springer, 2012, p. 363). The geographer Eratosthenes (276
- 194 BC) (ibid.), Keltoi refers to all peoples west of the Alps. The astronomer and geographer Hipparchus
of Nicaea (c. 190 - c. 120 BC) seems to have conceived of Keltiké as extending as far as the Arctic Circle
(Sharon Turner, The History of the Anglo-Saxons, vol. 1 and 2,
Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1823, p. 43), whereas, according to Plutarch, the country of
the Keltoi extended as far as the Sea of Azov (ibid., p. 38; see, for an in-depth and synthetic
examination of all the ancient sources relating to the question of the location of the Celts, Simon
Pelloutier and Chiniac de La Bastide, Histoire des Celtes, nouv. éd., t. 2, Paris, 1771).
This tendency to Celticise everything that was neither Roman nor Greek came to a halt in the 1st
century BC. "The whole of Gaul is divided into three parts, one of which is inhabited by the Belgians,
the other by the Aquitanians, the third by those who, in their language, are called Celts, and in the
third by the Romans.
nôtre, Gaulois" ("Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres, quarum unam incolunt Belgae, aliam Aquitani,
tertiam qui ipsorum lingua Celtae, nostra Galli appellantur"), writes César (La Guerre des Gaules, I, 1)
"which tells us that in Gaulish Celta does not refer to all the continental Celts, but to the branch of the
Celtic race established between the Garonne, the Seine and the Marne at the time when the
conquest of Transalpine Gaul, 58 BC" (Hubert d'Arbois de Jubainville, Introduction à l'étude de la
littérature celtique, 1882, Librairie Thorin, Paris, p. 10-11, available at the following address
http://www.arbredor.com/ebooks/LitteratureCeltique.pdf, consulted on 10 December 2016. In the
second century AD, Pausanias IV, 1, 4 states that "Celts is the name that these peoples formerly gave
themselves and that others also gave them", adding that these peoples were
are limited to those who "live at the extremities of Europe, near a vast sea whose limits cannot be
reached by ships". Also in the 1st century BC, Strabo and Diodorus Siculus
will place the Keltoi in more or less the same region as where Hecataeus of Millet had indicated they
lived (**). Similarly, Posidonios (135 - 51 BC), whose studies of Gaul were summarised by Strabo and
Diodorus, saw Narbonia as the heartland of the Keltiké, whose location
It is very important to note that the Celts' ethnic make-up was "quite complex", given that "various
Mediterranean influences (Iberian, Ligurian, Greek, Carthaginian, Roman) met there" (Venceslas Kruta, Les
Celtes, coll. "Que sais-je?", PUF, Paris, 2012) and that all these populations had long been influenced by
the "Greeks" from Asia Minor, the Phocaeans (Napoleon III,
Histoire de Jules César, t. 2, Henri Plon, Paris, 1866, p. 20), who founded Massalia in 600 BC.
No less ethnically diverse were the peoples, scattered over a triangular geographical area whose apex
was formed by Bohemia and whose base was formed by a line running f r o m Ireland to the centre of
Spain, who are today included under the term "Celts". Here, tall, blond, dolichocephalic Germans
rubbed shoulders with small and medium-sized peoples,
brown, hairy, brachycephalic, like the Gaels, Aquitanians, Vlachs, Ligurians, Welsh, etc... As far as
Gaul is concerned, the differences between the three peoples who, according to Caesar, lived there,
and the Gauls, are very obvious.
These nations differ from one another i n language, institutions and laws". (see, on the subject of this
extract from the Guerre des Gaules, "Histoire des Gaulois, depuis les temps les plus reculés jusqu'à
l'entière soumission de la Gaule à la domination romaine, par
Mr Amédée Thierry, member of the Institut. 3rd edition, revised and expanded. - Paris, Jules Labitte, 1844.
In Joseph Adolphe Aubenas and Emmanuel Miller (eds.), Revue de bibliographie analytique, vol. 6, May 1845,
p. 432-445; Christian Koch, "Qu'est-ce que la Gaule et les Gaulois dans l'oeuvre 'De Bello Gallico' de
César"? GRIN Verlag, 2008, available at
http://www.hausarbeiten.de/faecher/vorschau/110987.html, consulted on 16 December 2016; see,
on the subject of the infidelities to Caesar's text in the Pontus geographer's observations on Gaul (IV,
4), which he knew mainly through the Gallic War, the fine remarks of Claude Charles Fauriel, Dante et
les origines de la langue et de la littérature italiennes, vol. 2, Auguste Durand, Paris, 1854, p. 158 et
seq). With regard to the British Isles, recent genetic research has shown that the 'Celts' are not a
homogenous genetic group (Pallab Ghosh, DNA study shows Celts are not a unique genetic group, BBC
News, http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-
31905764)
In the light of this necessary overview of the "Celtic" question, "a denomination which (seems) ... to
have only a vague, indeterminate meaning, not applying to any particular people, to any distinct race"
(G. Lagneau, Distinction ethnique des Celtes et des Gaëls et de leur migration au Sud des Alpes,
Bulletins de la Société d'anthropologie de Paris, vol. 11, n° 1, 1876 [p. 128-145], p. 32), while applying
to an
mosaic of peoples, or even races, does the statement that "... among the barbarians, the Celts, who
nevertheless possess magnificent women, have a preference for boys, so that many of them are seen
sleeping with two cuties at the same time on their beds made of animal skins" still have the same value
and meaning?
(*) The word and concept of Männerbund have given rise to a great many misunderstandings, which
need to be cleared up by demystifying their origins. In Germany at the end of the nineteenth century
and the beginning of the twentieth, "men's societies" were formed. Stefan Georg was idolised by a
circle of openly homosexual poets and critics. In 1903, the sexologist, sociologist, economist and
Jewish volcanologist Benedict Friedländer (1866-1908) founded the homosexual organisation
Gemeinschaft der Eigenen (GdE) ("The Community of Specials") with anarchist writer Adolf Brand
(1874-1945) - he campaigned for the recognition of bisexuality and male homosexuality - and a dozen
other homosexuals, named after the libertarian philosopher Max Stirner's notion of the independence
of the "Unique" (the individual). In contrast to Magnus Hirschfeld, for whom
the homosexual was a female, the GoE emphasised the homosexual's masculinity,
as Gide would do in Corydon in 1924. Some of its members, referring to an ancient Greece straight out
of their imagination, dreamt of institutionalising pederasty, while others
aspired to recreate the 'literary friendships' that writers of the German Romantic period had enjoyed at
the end of the eighteenth century (see Harry Oosterhuis and Hubert Kennedy (eds.), Homosexuality and
Male Bonding in Pre-Nazi Germany, chap IV: "Eros and Male Bonding in Society", Routledge, New York
- London, 2013). Friedländer, a member of the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee, an organisation
defending the rights of homosexuals, bisexuals and transgender people created in 1897 by the
Magnus Hirschfeld, a Jewish physician, disagreed with him about the nature of male homosexuality
and the strategy to advance their cause, and refused to join Hirschfeld's efforts to forge an alliance
with the Social Democrats and the feminist movement. In the latter respect, their disagreement was
not only strategic, as his
This conception of society was similar to that set out by Heinrich Schurtz (1863-1903) in Alter Klassen
und Mannerbünde. Eine Darstellung der Grundformen der Gesellschaft (Berlin, Georg Reimer, 1902; it
was this ethnographer who coined the term "Mannerbünde"): women,
driven exclusively by the procreative instinct, could only have a formative effect on the family.
Only man, governed by two primary instincts - the sexual instinct and the social instinct - was a human being.
capable of creating and maintaining political institutions (Harry Oosterhuis and Hubert Kennedy
[eds.], op. cit.). While the "instinctive sympathy" between men that Schurtz placed at the origin of all
civilisation had no erotic character in his eyes, Friedländer affirmed that organisations
the family could not exist, if men did not have relationships with each other.
sentimental and erotic than with women (ibid.). Friedländer's interpretation of the Schurtzian concept of
the Männerbund was tendentious, but in retrospect it lent itself to distortion, since it was based on
ethnographic studies of primitive populations.
originating in North America, West Africa and Melanesia (N. W. Thomas, "Compte rendu d'Altersklassen
und Männerbünde, Eine Darstellung der Grundformen der Gesellschaft by Heinrich
Schurtz', Folklore, vol. 15, N° 1, March 1904, pp. 108-113) and, as we know today, homosexual behaviour
has always been widespread among these populations. The concept of
The homosexual Männerbund was popularised by Hans Blüher in Die deutsche Wandervogelbewegung
als erostisches Phänomen (1912), a work that immediately attracted a great deal of attention, in
which he argued that homosexual eroticism was essential to the movement's cohesion and
popularity.
Wandervogel, of which he himself was one of the first members and from which he was expelled -
temporarily - for homosexuality (Robert Beachy, "Review of Claudia Bruns, Politik des Eros: Der
Männerbund in Wissenschaft, Politik und Jugendkultur (1880-1934)", Böhlau Verlag. Böhlau Verlag.
Cologne
- Weimar - Vienna, 2008, p. 331). It was not until the late 1910s that Wandervogel section leaders
dared to openly advocate the cause of pederasty (Joachim Münster, Sur le chemin des enfants. L'Éros
blühérien dans le mouvement allemand de la jeunesse, Gaie France, n°8
(December 1987 - January 1988, pp. 25-29). Die deutsche Wandervogelbewegung als erostisches
Phänomen, based on Blüher's youthful experiences in the Wandervogel movement, was influenced in its
theoretical apparatus by the writings of Sigmund Freud (he described his
See Jay Geller, "Freud, Blüher, and the Secessio Inversa: Männerbünde, Homosexuality, and Freud's
Theory of Cultural Formation". In Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz and Ann Pellegrini (eds.), Queer Theory
and the Jewish Question, Columbia
University Press, New York - Chichester, West Sussex, 2003, p. 96) and Friedländer (see Harry Oosterhuis
and Hubert Kennedy [eds.], op. cit.). Paradoxically, Blüher claimed to be anti-Semitic; less strangely, his
anti-Semitism became more pronounced when conservatives publicly questioned whether he was a
pure-bred German. "In response, Blüher adopted a
self-defence strategy based on the notion of racial purity and, despite his initial support for Jewish
psychiatrists and sexologists, he became increasingly anti-Semitic after 1912... Blüher parried his
Männerbund theory during the First World War and responded to Conservative hostility to
homosexuality with ever more virulent anti-Semitism and misogyny.
In his two-volume Die Erotik der männlichen Gesellschaft, published in 1917 and 1919, Blüher
"Germanised" Männerbund, explaining that male homosexuality was a typically German phenomenon
and denouncing Jews as a foreign body incapable of contributing to the German state.
Blüher's writings of the 1920s... made him one of the best-known anti-Semites of the Weimar period.
His theory of the Männerbund inspired the Bündisch movement and anti-democratic opponents of the
Weimar Republic... Blüher was among the first to use the expression 'konservative Revolution' in
1918..." (Robert Beachy, op. cit., p. 332). Not only was he "among the first to
Blüher did not use the expression "konservative Revolution" in 1918...", but he was considered one of
the main thinkers of the konservative Revolution by Armin Mohler, a historian of the movement (Die
Konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918-1932. Ein Handbuch) and Ernst Jünger's private secretary.
It is no coincidence that Blüher was the only homosexual activist of the time to be mentioned by
Himmler in his speech to the Gruppenführer on homosexuality.
(https://elementsdeducationraciale.wordpress.com/2014/12/31/discours-au-gruppenfuhrer-surhomosexuality/).
The hunt for homosexuals was such a priority for the national leaderssocialists
who were not homosexuals that in July 1944, when nearly seven thousand Germans had
already been convicted of homosexuality, homosexuals were still being tried in Germany (Jeremy
Noakes, Nazism, 1919-1945, vol. 4, University of Exeter Press, Exeter,
1998, p. 392; three years earlier, on 21 August 1941, Hitler had condemned the "scourge of
homosexuality" ["die Pest der Homosexualität"] in the Wehrmacht and the NSDAP, demanding that
it be fought "with ruthless rigour" ["rücksichtslose Strenge"], during a consultation meeting at his
headquarters, the memorandum of which does not appear to have survived; Günter Grau, Claudia
Schoppman, Homosexualität in der NS-Zeit: Dokumente einer Diskriminierung und Verfolgung, Fischer
Taschenbuch Verlag, 1993, p. 211); well-informed, he was aware of the influence of Blüher's ideas on a
whole section of intellectuals and young people; when he observed that "this state of men is about to
be destroyed because of homosexuality", he was referring as much to the channels for spreading
homosexual ideology as to the practice itself and those who indulged in it.
Reacting against the hold of women and Jewish values on the German family and against the
The resulting feminisation of social life, by theorising the Männerbund as the foundation of
politics, as Blüher did (Jay Geller, op. cit., p. 94) was a step in the right direction; doing so in the
name o f a homosexual vision of man, which was propagated simultaneously by doctors and
Jewish sexologists, was an aberration. The thesis, which its propagators, like Neill, presented as an
established fact, that an initiation based on homosexual practices was the condition for
necessary for young boys to be admitted to Aryan warrior brotherhoods is largely based on Stig
Wikander's Der arische Männerbund. Studien zur indo-iranischen Sprach- und Religionsgeschichte
(Lund, Håkan Ohlssons Buchdruckerei, 1938) and, more specifically, on the association - which he was
the first to dare - between the term 'arische' and that of 'Männerbund' - the description that the
Swedish Indianist, Iranologist and historian of religions gives of these brotherhoods is, in fact, very
similar to that of the 'Männerbund'.
Partly fanciful, since, without going so far as to speak of ritual homosexuality in their regard, he
attributes to their cult some of the characteristics of the cults of indigenous pre-indo-European
peoples ("orgiastic ritual sacrifices", "a positive attitude towards the dark and demonic forces of life";
see Michael Cooperson, "Bandits". In Robert Gleave and István Kristo-Nagy, Violence in Islamic
Thought from the Qur'an to the Mongols, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2015, p. 197. The
Maruts, of whom he makes bands of young Aryan warriors, were in reality an indigenous tribe
(Padmacandra Kāśyapa, Living Pre-Rigvedic and Early Rigvedic Traditions of Himalayas, Pratibha
Prakashan, 2000, p. 184; as for the Maryannu (from the Sanskrit "marya": "young hero"), an elite
group of chariot warriors who founded the kingdom of Mitanni between the loop of the Euphrates
and the headwaters of the Tigris in the 15th century BC and whose members bore Indo-Iranian names
(William H. Stiebing Jr, Ancient Near Eastern History and Culture. 2nd edn, Routledge, London - New
York, p. 112), they by no means constituted a Männerbund (Armin Lange, Light Against Darkness:
Dualism in Ancient Mediterranean Religion and the Contemporary World, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
Göttingen, 2011, pp.
88).
(**) Dion Cassius (c. 155 - AD 235) (Roman History, XXXIX, 49) gave the name Celts to the Germans
alone. The inconsistency with which this author identified the different peoples who
populated Western Europe (see John Eadie, A Commentary on the Greek Text of the Epistle of Paul to
the Philippians, Edinburgh - London - Dublin, T. & T. Clark - Hamilton & Co - John Robertson and Co,
1869, p. xxi).
(ixa) Contrary to popular opinion, "there is absolutely no evidence, literary or otherwise, of any
pederasty in Sparta before the end of the fifth century BC" (Paul Cartledge, Spartan Reflections,
University of California Press, Berkeley - Los Angeles, 2003, p. 102). F r o m an author who had
entitled one of his lectures "Sodom in Sparta" twenty years earlier, this admission carries considerable
weight. A fortiori, pederasty was never "institutionalised" in Sparta,
as William A. Percy III in Pederasty and Pedagogy in Archaic Greece (University of Illinois Press, Urbana
- Chicago, 1998), one of the works which, along with those by Foucault and Éros adolescent: la
pédérastie dans la Grèce antique (Les Belles Lettres, Paris, 1980) by Abbé Félix Buffière, contributed
greatly to the spread among the general public of the myth of a homosexual Sparta, disregarding the
Republic of the Lacedemonians (II, 12): "I believe I must also speak of the loves of the
This is part of the education of children. Among some Greek peoples, such as the Boeotians, a man
who has been made will form an intimate relationship with a boy, or, as among the
In Elea, the favours of youth are won by gifts; elsewhere, it is not even a question of gifts.
allowed suitors to speak to boys. Lycurgus had opposite principles on this subject. When a decent man,
infatuated with the soul of a boy, aspired to make a friend of him without
But whoever seemed to love only the body, he declared infamous. But anyone who seemed to be in
love only with the body, he declared infamous; and so he made it so that in Lacedemonia lovers
abstained no less from amorous dealings with boys than parents did with their children.
brothers with their brothers". In this respect, it is revealing that no works of art dealing with
homosexual eroticism have been found in Sparta, whereas excavations have brought them to light
i n other Greek cities (Helena P. Schrader, Leonidas of Sparta: A Boy of the Agoge, Wheatmark,
Tucson, AZ, 2010, p. 24; Abbé Buffière struggles to produce a handful of illustrations in chapter 7 of
'Éros adolescent: la pédérastie dans la Grèce antique': 'Miroir de la pédérastie'.
Athenian". Of the 80,000 vases unearthed to date in Attica, around thirty allude to homosexual
practices, which were also carried out in the "Athenian" style.
only satyrs. Was this a "mirror of Athenian pederasty" or a mirror of the abbot's own fantasies? See
Adonis Georgiades, Homosexuality in Ancient Greece. The Myth is Collapsing, Georgiades, Athens, 2004,
p. 127, available at
h t t p s : / / i a 6 0 1 9 0 8 . u s . a r c h i v e . o r g / 3 5 / i t e
m s / A d o n i s G e o r g i a d e s H o m o s e x u a l i t y I n A
n c i e n t G r e e c e T h e M y t h I s C
ollapsing/Adonis%20Georgiades%20Homosexuality%20in%20Ancient%20Greece%20-
%20The%20Myth%20is%20Collapsing.pdf, accessed on 12 December 2016; the work has been the
subject of a video outlining it:
Herodotus, the first
author to mention the agōgē, a Spartan institution that Xenophon is suggested to have c l a ime d was
founded on pederasty, makes no allusion to homosexuality, "educational" or otherwise, which, we are
told, Attic comic authors would then have imputed to the Spartans: which comic authors are we talking
about? How can it be maintained on the basis of Republic of the Lacedemonians (II, 12) that pederasty
was practised in the agōgē, when Xenophon says.
precisely the opposite? How can Plutarch be decently presented as a source attesting to the institutional
nature of homosexuality in Sparta, when he declares: "It was permissible
(Apophtegmas of the Lacedemonians, 237c) (see, on the subject of the French authors of the
Enlightenment who had "the ancient authors say the very opposite of what they said", among other
things on homosexuality in the Greco-Roman world, Jeremy Bentham, Essay on the
pederasty, GKC, Paris, 2002, the first scholarly essay ever written in English on pederasty.
Homosexuality: edifying; see, on the subject of the falsification of quotations in order to demonstrate
the existence of institutionalised homosexuality in ancient Greece,
http://freedomoutpost.com/examples-distortion-history-homosexuality-sexual-perverts-wikipedia/)
With regard to the issue of homosexuality in Ancient Greece in general, it has been observed that
"(m)ost written sources on Sparta come from other Greek cities, where pederasty was de rigueur
among the elite" (Paul Chrystal, In Bed with the Ancient Greeks, Amberley Publishing, 2016) and
that, in classical Greece, homosexuality and pederasty were seen as a form of discrimination.
(Earl .E. Shelp (ed.), Sexuality and Medicine: Volume II: Ethical Viewpoints in Transition, D. Reidel
Publishing Company, Dordrecht - Boston - USA).
Lancaster - Tokyo, 2012) by the Middle Greeks, who condemned both practices (Plinio Prioreschi, A
History of Medicine: Greek medicine, Horatius Press, 1996, p. 48). Robert Flacelière (L'Amour en
Grèce, Hachette, 1971), the first to introduce this distinction, was considerably less affirmative: "It
seems highly probable that homosexuality was confined to the aristocratic and prosperous strata of
ancient society" (translated from Love in Ancient Greece, "trans. by
James Cleugh, Frederick Muller Ltd, London 1962). He points out that homosexuality was illegal in
most Greek cities and observes that the theme of Aristophanes' play Lysistrata shows, as does the
great popularity of the hetaera, that homosexuality could hardly have been endemic among the
common people. Homosexuality and pederasty are absent from Homeric literature. According to
experts on the subject of homosexuality in ancient Greece, they are "implicit". It has to be said that
almost all these "experts" were homosexuals. According to Aeschylus' scholiast (Sept. Theb., 81),
Laios, father of Oedipus, was the first Greek to indulge in pederasty (Louis Ferdinand Alfred Maury,
Histoire des religions de la Grèce antique, vol. 3, Ladrange, 1859, Paris, p. 38), "when he was invited by
Pelops", a beardless young man whom vases often show dressed in oriental garb.
(tunique tachetée et bonnet phrygien)" (Pierre Cuvelier, Le mythe de Pélops et d'Hippodamie en Grèce
ancienne : cultes, images, discours, doctoral thesis, University of Poitiers, 2012, p. 4). Pelops was
from Phrygia (Herodotus, VII, 8), the land of the mother goddess Cybele. The exotic origin of
homosexuality is thus clearly suggested by the myth.
(1) Jaquetta Hawkes and Sir Leonard Woolley, Prehistory and the Beginnings of Civilization, Harper &
Row, New York, 1963, p. 218.
(2) Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology, Penguin Books, New York, 1969, p. vii.
(3) Jaquetta Hawkes and Sir Leonard Woolley, op. cit. p. 242.
(4) Ibid, p. 371.
(5) Vern L. Bullough, Sexual Variance in Society and History, John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1976, p.
55; David F. Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality, University of Chicago Press, Chicago,
1988, p. 126.
(6) Vern L. Bullough, op. cit. p. 54-55.
(7) David F. Greenberg, op. cit. p. 124-126.
(8) Ibid, p. 126.
(9) Vern L. Bullough, op. cit. p. 56.
(10) Ibid.
(11) David F. Greenberg, op. cit. p. 127 note.
(12) Ibid, pp. 126-127.
(13a) Moreover, the term "gala" is a homophone of "gal-la", "vulva".
(13b) The forthcoming commercialisation of sex robots (http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/worldnews/
sex-robots-warm-skin-intimate-8985045) which, it goes without saying, "could even have
positive effects on relationships" - ... human? - must be understood in the light of the following
remarks
on the etymology of the word 'kurgarru' and related terms: "Many creatures in Sumerian texts are clearly
not human. They are described as being 'neither masculine nor feminine', in other words as
androgynous. Most translations get round this problem by translating their names as "eunuchs". But this
term is not
satisfactory, because the texts clearly state that they do not eat or drink, have no emotions and have no
family life. It is obvious that these creatures have no human qualities whatsoever; on the contrary, they
have the passivity and characteristics of machines... Five of them are
mentioned in the list of "me" (the word "me" means "energy", "power" or "might" in Sumerian [N.D.E.])
that Ishtar received from Enki. These robots are known respectively as Kurgarru, Galatur, Sagursag,
Girbadara and Galla. None of these Sumerian words has an equivalent in English. They do not
are generally not translated for the simple reason that nobody knows their exact meaning or how to
render them in modern languages. Other terms that are equally difficult to translate
seem to refer to artificial creatures - the Lilis, Ub, Mesi and Ala were called "demons". These demons
were apparently very numerous and bothered and oppressed the Mesopotamians.
Kurgarru was one of the creatures Enki had produced to enter the realm of the dead and save
Ishtar. A "creature neither masculine nor feminine", he was designed to enter the realm of the
dead "through the cracks in (his) door", in other words by devious means. Being neither human nor
divine, he was not subject to the draconian rules imposed by the "me" to enter and remain in the
realm of the dead.
out of the realm of the dead and could move about as she pleased. Kurgarru, or Kurgurru, is one of
the 'me' that Ishtar received from Enki. A study of the elements that make up the term 'kurgarru', or
'kurgurru', will show that Ishtar's 'me' was one of the most important.
kurgurru" indicates that it can be translated as "shiny metallic robot". "Kur" often has the meaning of
"In its second meaning, it refers to the monsters of the realm of the dead. "Gur" means "to be
mobile", or "to move"; "ma-gur" refers to the means of transport used by Enki to get from one place
to another.
travel the canals of the rivers of Mesopotamia. "Ra" means "shiny", in the case of a metal. It is possible
that "garra" is a form, or a corruption, of "galla", which means "mechanical man". (R. A. Boulay, Flying
Serpents and Dragons: The Story of Mankind's Reptilian Past, revised and expanded edition, 1999, The
Book Tree, Escondido, p. 253). It is
It should be noted that the Sumerians attributed "me", or "powers", to "stones", a term which, in the
Semitic languages, refer to gems and quartz crystals in particular. According to the Haggadah, or
ceremonial of the first two evenings of Passover, a Jewish text compiled at the same time as the
Mishna and the Talmud, the five stones that David chose to confront Goliath (ibid., p. 237) were
endowed with magical powers.
(13c) Will Roscoe, "Precursors of Islamic Homosexualities". In Stephen O. Murray (ed.), Islamic
Homosexualities, Garland Publishing, New York, p. 65.
(14) David F. Greenberg, op. cit. p. 97 [In Sumer, priestesses were called "assinutum", a feminine
form of "assinu", because, in order not to become pregnant, they limited themselves to anal
intercourse. Ibid, p. 97.
(15) Jaquetta Hawkes and Sir Leonard Woolley, op. cit. pp. 334-44; see also Marijas Gimbutas, The
Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe: Myths and Cult Images, University of Califormia Press,
Berkeley, 1982, pp. 112-215.
(16) Joseph Campbell, op. cit. p. 36-37.
(17) James Mellaart, Catal Huyuk, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1967, pp. 23-24; see also Jaquetta Hawkes and
Sir Leonard Woolley, op. cit. pp. 218-227.
(18) Jaquetta Hawkes and Sir Leonard Woolley, op. cit. pp. 218-227; Joseph Campbell, op. cit. pp. 36-45.
(19) Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future, Harper Collins, San Francisco, 1988,
p. 56-58 (as the author's clumsy wording could lead to confusion, it is worth pointing out that in Indo-
European vocabulary there is no name for the mother goddess or the
earth goddess. In historical times, there have been peoples whose language, of Indo-European origin,
contained terms for the goddess and who, in fact, worshipped one, whether these peoples were of Indo-
European origin, such as the Achaeans, the Dorians, the Germanic tribes, or not, such as the Minoans
(Charles Barber, Joan Beal and Philip Shaw, The English Language, 2nd ed.., Cambridge University Press,
2012, p. 82) It seems highly likely that the adoption of mother goddess cults by tribes
of Indo-European origin who migrated to what is now known as Europe dates from the time when they
came into contact with the Semitic peoples, who, conversely, if we may make this working hypothesis,
would have been driven, by imitation and perhaps by a desire to d amn them, to put forward either their
own male divinities or even one of their own.
them, as in the case of the Semitic monotheisms, knowing that these divinities were hybrid rather
than masculine, or masculinised forms of their feminine divinities)
(20) Gordon Rattray Taylor, "Historical and Mythological Aspects of Homosexuality". In Judd Marmor
(ed.), Sexual Inversion: The Multiple Roots of Homosexuality, Basic Books, New York, 1965, pp. 148-
149; David F. Greenberg, op. cit. pp. 94-100.
(21) Edwin M. Yamauchi, "Cultic Prostitution: A Case in Cultural Diffusion". In Harry A. Hoffner, Jr (ed.),
Orient and Occident, Verlag Butzon & Bercker Kevelaer, Neukirchen-Vluyn, 1973, pp. 214-217.
(22a) On the subject of sa ziqni and sa res, see Will Roscoe, op.
cit. (22b) Will Roscoe, op. cit. pp. 66-67.
(23) Francisco Guerra, The Pre-Columbian Mind, Seminar Press, New York, 1971, p. 91 (see Didier
Godard, L'autre Faust: l'homosexualité masculine pendant la Renaissance, 2001, p. 19).
(24) Raymond de Becker, The Other Face of Love, Grove Press, New York, 1969, p. 8, in Don C.
Talayessva, Sun Chief: Autobiography of a Hopi Indian, Leo W. Summons (ed.), Yale College, New
Haven, Institute of Human Relations, 1942.
(25) Raymond DeBecker, The Other Face of Love, trans. by Margaret Crosland and Alan Daventry.
Grove Press, New York, 1969 p. 7.
(26) David F. Greenberg, op. cit. p. 101.
(27) Edwin M. Yamauchi, "Cultic Prostitution: A Case in Cultural Diffusion". In Harry A. Hoffner, Jr (ed),
op. cit, p. 214.
(28) David F. Greenberg, op. cit. p. 96.
(29) Will Roscoe, "Precursors of Islamic Homosexualities". In Stephen O. Murray (ed.),
Islamic Homosexualities, Garland Publishing, New York, 1997, p. 67.
(30) N. K. Sandars, The Epic of Gilgamesh, Penguin Books, London, 1972, p. 8, 13.
(31) Anne Draffkorn Kilmer, "A Note on an Overlooked Word-Play in the Akkadian Gilgamesh". In G.
Van Driel, T.J.H. Krispijn, M. Stol and K.R. Veenhof (eds.), Zikir Sumim: Assyriological Studies Presented
to F.R. Kraus on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday, E.J. Brill, Leiden 1982, p. 129.
(32) N. K. Sandars, op. cit. p. 30.
(33) Translations, unless otherwise indicated, by Alexander Heidel, The Gilgamesh Epic and Old
Testament Parallels, University of Chicago Press, 1971, Chicago, pp. 18-33.
(34) Thorkild Jacobsen, "How Did Gilgamesh Oppress Uruk?", Acta Orientalia, vol. 8, 1929, p. 70.
(35) Anne Draffkorn Kilmer, op. cit. p. 128-129.
(36) N. K. Sandars, op. cit. p. 68-69.
(37a). Thorkild Jacobsen, "How Did Gilgamesh Oppress Uruk?" Acta Orientalia, vol. 8, 1929, p. 72.
(37b) What the author is clearly suggesting here is that having too many children encourages
homosexual behaviour.
(38) David F. Greenberg, op. cit. p. 129.
(39) Raymond De Becker, op. cit. p. 14.
(40) David F. Greenberg, op. cit. p. 130-134.
(41) Raymond De Becker, op. cit. p. 14-15.
(42) Vern L. Bullough, op. cit, pages 64-65 (for a French translation of this incomplete text, see
Pascal Vernus, Dictionnaire amoureux de l'Egypte pharaonique, Plon, 2009).
(43) Ibid, p. 65.
(44) See, for example, Judges, 19: 22-30; I Samuel, 18:1-3; I Samuel, 20:30; II Samuel, 1:26;
Deuteronomy, 23: 17; I Kings, 14:24; II Kings, 23:7.
(45) As noted above, the oldest text of the epic dates from the middle of the third century AD.
millennium BC. The sexual nature of the relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu appears in the
Akkadian version, which dates from 2400-2200 BC (see Kilmer, op cit.). The ban on
Homosexuality in the Hebrew Scriptures, which is examined in this chapter and was the first such
prohibition in the ancient world, is found in the book of Leviticus, which was written after the return
of the Israelites from captivity at the end of the sixth or fifth century BC. Some historians have pointed
to a ban on homosexuality in the teachings of the Iranian prophet Zoroaster, who is thought to have
lived around 1200 BC. However, the texts in which this prohibition appears date from the 3rd century
BC, at the time of the domination of the
Parthians over Persia. The Vendidad, a Zoroastrian text written around 250 BC in Persia, contains
provisions prohibiting homosexuality as part of a sexual code promoting sexuality.
procreative. However, Greek historians attest to a homosexual tradition in Persia from the 5th century
BC onwards, so it seems that the ban must have had little effect on the
It is not possible to say much about the sexual behaviour of the Persians, apart from that of the devout
Zoroastrians who lived in rural eastern Persia (see David F. Greenberg, op. cit. pp. 186-189). Although
the concept of sexual asceticism was developed in Greek Stoicism in the third century BC, some two
thousand years after the writing of the Gilgamesh epic, the Stoics did not disapprove of sexual
pleasure or of the "pleasure of the flesh".
homosexuality, since the founder of the school, Zeno, had a lover, Parmenides. They simply advocated
moderation and self-control. However, the Stoic concepts, introduced in the
precepts of the Mosaic law by the Hellenistic writer Philo Judaeus and combined with the attitude of
rejection of the world of dualist cults and the anti-sexual teachings of classical Neo-Platonism,
formed the basis of the vehement anti-sexual asceticism which developed in the Christian church from the
third and fourth centuries AD. Sexual asceticism as an ideal of Christian morality - an attitude totally alien
to the teachings of the Gospels - is examined in chapter 9.
(46) Louis M. Epstein, Sex Laws and Customs in Judaism, Bloch, New York, 1948, p. 3-4. Curiously,
Epstein argues that, although there is no evidence that the Hebrews disapproved of the practices
homosexuality before the period of exile, they had always condemned it. It is based on the account of
the destruction of Sodom in Genesis and on the account in the book of Judges of the destruction of
the city of Gaba following the attempted rape of a man to whom one o f its inhabitants had offered
hospitality. In both cases, Jewish tradition states that what
provoked the punishment was not homosexuality per se, but the brutal behaviour of its inhabitants
towards visitors ("since this man has entered my house, don't commit this infamy").
- Judges, 19:23).
(47) Tom Horner, Jonathan Loved David: Homosexuality in Biblical Times, Westminster
Press, Philadelphia, 1978, pp. 15-25.
(48) Judges, 3:2; Joshua, 23:13; Exodus, 23:29. See also Riane Eisler, op. cit. pp. 58, 94-95.
(49) See, for example, Joshua, 6:21; 6:26; 7:24-26; 8:22-29; 11:6-17; 10: 10-11; 10:24-32; Judges,
1:2-6; 1:17, 19; 1:25; 3:28-29; 4:15-16; 8:7, 16: 9:5; 12:6; 18:27; 20:35-48; 1 Samuel, 11:11; 15:2-
3; 15:7-8, 20; 22:18-19; 27:8-11; 30:17; 2 Samuel, 8:2-4; 12:31.
(50) Riane Eisler, op. cit. pp. 43-45, 94-95
(51a) Ibid. p. 93.
(51b) The bull was indeed both a symbol of Baal and a symbol of Yahweh (Judges, 6-24-29) (James S.
Anderson, Monotheism and Yahweh's Appropriation of Baal, Bloomsbury Academic, 2015, p. 65). In
almost all English translations of the Bible (Deuteronomy, 33-17, Numbers, 23:22) Yahweh is described
as having horns that resemble "the horns of the bull". Other parallels between Yahweh and Baal include
the fact that both gods had the title of "ly",
"(Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel, 2nd edn,
William B. Eerdrmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids , MI - Cambridge, 2002, p. 65 ff).
The bull is also the symbol of El, a deity who was supplanted by Baal in Ugaritic mythology. Yahweh is
explicitly associated with El and Baal on several inscriptions found on the
site of Kuntillet Ajrud, located in the north-east of the Sinai Peninsula (Watson E. Mills (ed.), Mercer
Dictionary of the Bible, Mercer University Press, p. 494) and it is perhaps no coincidence that the
oldest Hebrew name for a god is Baal (as there is no bullfighting divinity that is not associated with a
mother goddess, to whom he is subordinate, the question therefore arises as to which mother goddess
the first god of the Israelites was subordinate: the mother goddess Asherath? See Tilde Binger , Asherah:
Goddesses in Ugarit, Israel and the Old Testament ; John Day, Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of
Canaan, Sheffield Academic Press, Sheffield, 1997 ; Saul M. Ollyan, Asherah and the cult of Yahweh in
Israel, Scholars Press, 1988 [Editor's note].
It will not be useless to repeat here what we have already said elsewhere about the symbolism of the
horn, expanding our remarks. Firstly, the crescent shape of bovid horns is lunar in character and, as such,
they are the emblem of the mother goddess. While it is true that "they can become a symbolic vector of
solar and male power", this is only in the relative sense that the sun they represent is the one that dies
and is reborn every day, like the great divinities of the Semitic pantheons, and not the immutable and
perfect essence that the gods associated with this star symbolised for the Aryan peoples; it is only in the
relative sense that the masculine principle they evoke is, in accordance with the manifestation of virility
among the Semitic peoples, either
crudely material and sensualist, or brutal and ferociously warlike (see Julius Evola, Tre aspetti dello
problema ebraico, Ar, Padua, 1978, p. 7). As the horns "evoke the prestiges of strength
vital, of periodic creation, of inexhaustible life, of fecundity", "they have come to symbolise the
majesty of the benefits of royal power" (Jean Chevalier, Alain Gheerbrant, Marian Berlewi and Bernard
Gandet, Dictionnaires des symboles, revised and expanded edition, Robert Laffont, p 1982, p. 389), to
be more precise of a priestly-royal power delegated in some way by the goddess (in the catacombs,
the bull will be the emblem of the priest
https://ia601403.us.archive.org/11/items/lartchretien00corbgoog/lartchretien00corbgoog.pdf).
Throughout the Old Testament, the horn refers specifically to the power of the king: "The Lord will
judge the ends of the earth, and will give strength to his king, and will lift up the horn of his anointed"
(1 Samuel 2:10. The term "horn" has been replaced by "strength" in the Segond Bible); "Yahweh my
rock, my
my fortress, my deliverer, my God, my rock of refuge, my shield, the horn of my salvation, my
stronghold" (Psalm 18:2). Here again, the term "horn" has been expunged from some of the texts.
French translations of the Bible); God "will cause a horn of salvation to spring up for David" (Psalm,
132 , 17) (see, for other biblical references to the horn, S.J. Léopold Sabourin, L'Évangile de Luc :
introduction et commentaire, Editrice Pontificia Università Gregoriana, Rome, 1992; for an
examination, unfortunately not exhaustive, of the occurrences of the term "horn" in Ugaritic texts and
the Old Testament, A.H.W. Curtis, "Some observations on "Bull" Terminology in the Ugaritic Texts and
the Old Testament". In A. S. Van Der Woude (ed.), Quest of the Past: Studies on Israelite Religion,
Literature and prophetism, Brill, Leiden - New York - Coenhagen - Cologne, 1990). This metaphor is
repeated in the New Testament: the Lord "... has raised up for us a horn of salvation in the house of his
servant David" (Luke, 1, 69).
The hundreds of thousands of websites that have mastered the art of copying and pasting where the horns
are
denounced as a satanic emblem would almost succeed in making us forget that horns are a common
metaphor for power and might in Judeo-Christianity.
(51c) As the bull and the mother goddess form a divine couple in Semitic mythology, it is not surprising that
the
It is contradictory to assume that the original god of the Israelites was Baal (the bull), while asserting
that the cult of Yahweh developed in reaction to the cult of the mother goddess.
(52) Christopher L.C.E. Witcombe, "Eve and the Identity of Women: Part 6, the Old Testament,
Women & Evil". Images of Women in Ancient Art, Sweetbriar College, available at
http://witcombe.sbc.edu/eve-women/6womenevil.html, accessed on 22 December 2016.
(53) Dennis Bratcher, "Speaking the Language of Canaan: The Old Testament and the Israelite
Perception of the Physical World". Consultation on the Relationship between the Wesleyan
Tradition and the Natural Sciences, Kansas City, MO, 19 October 1991.
(54) Judges, 2:11-13; 3:7; 6:25 ff; 10:6; I Samuel, 8:4; 12:10.
(55) Tom Horner, op. cit. p. 64; David F. Greenberg, op. cit. p. 137-138.
(56) Judges, 2:13; 3:7; 6:25; 10:6; I Samuel, 7:4; 12:10.
(57) For example, Baal-Gad (Joshua, 11:17; 12:7; 13:5); Baal-Hermon (Judges, 3:3; I Chronicles, 5:23;
Baal-Meon (Numbers, 32:38; Ezekiel, 25:9; I Chronicles, 5:8).
(58) I Kings 18:19.
(59) Riane Eisler, op. cit. p. 87-88.
(60) 2 Kings, 18:4.
(61) Raphael Patai, The Hebrew Goddess, Avon, New York, 1978, pp. 12-3, pp. 48-50, quoted in Riane
Eisler, op. cit. p. 93.
(62) Tom Horner, Jonathan Loved David: Homosexuality in Biblical Times, Westminster Press,
Philadelphia, 1978, p. 64; David F. Greenberg, p. 137-138; on the subject of kadesh and their female
counterparts, see I Kings, 14.22-24, 15.12, 22.46; II Kings, 23:7; Deuteronomy, 23.17-18; Leviticus, 18:3,
24:30, 20:23 (the radical qdš generally refers to the notion of holiness in Semitic languages [Melissa
Hope Ditmore (ed.), Encyclopedia of Prostitution and Sex Work, vol. 2, p. 418]. It is found in Akkadian
"qadishtum" ("consecrated woman") and Canaanite "qedešah" ("consecrated woman").
"). Some documents attest that the qadishtum had the same functions as the kadesh. The qadishtum
could marry and have children, but had to go out veiled [New Orient, vol. 3,
Czechoslovak Society for Eastern Studies, 1962, p. 73]. In the Code of Hammurabi, however, the term
has the meaning of "consecrated woman", without having the connotation of "prostitute"; in the
ancient texts
In classical Babylonian literature, qadishtu are identified with witches [Youn Ho Chung, The Sin of the
Calf, 2010, t&t clark, New York - London, 2010, p. 159]. The temple staff of Ugarit included a qdshm.
who engaged in "sacred prostitution" to promote fertility [David M. Clemens, Sources for Ugaritic
Ritual and
Sacrifice: AOAT : Veröffentlichungen Zur Kultur und Geschichte Des Alten Orients und Des Alten
Testaments. Ugaritic and Ugarit Akkadian texts, Ugaritic-Verlag, 2001]. Finally, as the author points
out, at Memphis, on a monument dedicated to Qudsu, this Syrian goddess associated with love and
fertility is called "the prostitute" (David F. Greenberg, op. cit., p. 95 [N.D.E.]).
(63) 2 Kings, 23, 7.
(64) C.A. Tripp, The Homosexual Matrix, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1975, p. 6.
(65) Jeremiah, 44:24-48.
(66) 1 Kings, 14:24; 15:12; 22:46; Deuteronomy, 23:17-18; Leviticus, 19:4.
(67) Riane Eisler, op. cit. pp. 44-45, 94-95
(68a) Christopher L.C.E. Witcombe, op.
cit.
(68b) The author commits an anachronism. For Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, following Job, 41 to the
letter ("Corpus illius (Behemot) quasi scuta fusilla, compactum squamis se prementibus"), the body of
the demon is covered with bronze scales, "figures of the universality of sins and sinners" (M. Le Chanoine
J. Corblet (ed.), Revue de l'art chrétien, 2e série, t. 12, Paris - Arras, 1880, p. 18) "When paintings and
statues of the devil burst onto the art scene, they no longer appeared completely clothed in the devil's
image.
of scales, but formed entirely from the assembly of the limbs of several different animals making up one
and the same subject or rather one and the same monster, and this is what can be seen in all the
written, painted or sculpted works of art that have survived from this period. They show various parts
of animals with no mutual analogy, such as the legs of a monkey adapted to the body of a hen or a
palm, or the hooked beak of a hawk to the head of a mammal. It is for this reason that the figures of
the demons are so
The first known precise description of the devil comes from the monk Raoul Glauber. The first known
precise description of the devil is by the monk Raoul Glauber (985- 1045) who, in his Histories, relates
the vision he had of him in a dream as follows: "He was small of stature, with a frail neck, an
emaciated face, very black eyes, a rough and tense forehead, pinched nostrils, a prominent mouth,
thick lips, a receding and very narrow chin, a goat's beard, hairy and tapering ears, bristly hair, dog's
teeth, a pointed skull, and a very long, stubby face.
swollen chest, a hunchback on his back, his buttocks quivering, sordid clothes" (Les Histoires, V, 1,
quoted in Bernard Teyssedre, Le Diable et l'Enfer au temps de Jésus, Albin Michel, 2014, p. 249). In
Hildegard von Bingen's Scivias (c. 1150), a work adorned with illuminations depicting twenty-six of her
mystical visions, Satan is not horned (https://s-media-cacheak0.
pinimg.com/originals/30/93/93/309393074ba71365a4999abf14e4c234.jpg). In Ordo virtutum, a
liturgical drama of his own composition, the figure of Satan "has the skin of a reddish-brown beast
similar to that of dragons" (Morgan A. Matos, "The Satanic Phenomenon: Medieval Representations of
Satan", PhD thesis, 2011, available at:
http://scholarship.rollins.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1027&context=mls, accessed 23 December 2016,
p. 35) in pictorial representations of the period. As early as the twelfth century, Satan began to be
depicted as a fantastic animal with bull's horns in bestiaries and psalters
(http://ica.themorgan.org/manuscript/page/28/76977; England, Oxford c. 1215), in the
breviaries and bibles. According to Canon J. Corblet (op. cit., p. 18), it was because of the need to
illustrate vice and evil with monstrous forms that "the bull's horns, an attribute of his
and physical power, are often attributed to the devil in hieratic painting...".
The "Middle Ages". Why would bull's horns be monstrous? In reality, Satan, for
the Church of the time, himself represented the Jew, whom Christians associated with horns by virtue
of a supposed mistranslation of a word in Exodus, 34.29 ("Now it happened that when Moses came down
from
on Mount Sinai, holding in his hand the two Tables of the Testimony, when [I say] he came down from the
mountain, he did not notice that the skin of his face had become radiant while he was speaking with God")
in the vulgate (according to Charles Szlakmann, "The Hebrew verses mention the expression "karan or
panau" three times. the skin of his face was radiant". But Saint Jerome translated "cornuta esset facies sua"
"his face was horned". He fell victim to the phonetic proximity between the Hebrew words 'karan', to
radiate, and keren, horn." (Moïse, Paris, Gallimard, "Folio Biographies" collection, 2009, p. 189-190;
according to The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon, Jerome was not the victim of anything at
all, because "qaran" can be translated as "horns", or more accurately, and this detail is important, "horns of
a goat": (http://www.lehrhaus.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Exodus- 30-1-10.pdf, p. 1). The Church
reinforced the association of the Jew with the image of a horned devil by taking a
a decree that required Jews to wear a "horned" hat ("pileum cornutum", which - another important
detail - more closely resembles a Phrygian cap) (Mariko Mizayaki, Misericord Owls and
Medieval Anti-Semitism. In Debra Hassig (ed.), The Mark of the Beast: The Medieval Bestiary in Art, Life,
and Literature, Garland Publishing Inc, New York - London, 1999, p. 29.) From the "Middle Ages" to the
"Renaissance
Michael Pacher (Saint Augustin and the Devil,1471) gave them the shape o f insect antennae
(http://www.crisismagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Michael- Pacher.jpg); next to a
horned devil is a devil with feline ears in a painting by Hieronymus Bosch
(https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2015-10/23/10/enhanced/webdr13/enhanced- 24351-
1445610547-12.jpg); the shape of the horned crown of the devil depicted riding a horse in an undated
painting, but which, given its workmanship, must be from the 15th century.
(https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2015-10/23/10/enhanced/webdr03/enhanced-27502-
1445610695-1.jpg) is reminiscent of the fleur-de-lys; Fra Angelico, on the other hand, topped his with a
superb bull horns (http://www.romantisme-noir.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/fraangelico-
hell-1435-1440.jpg, whose purity of execution is on a par with that of t h e drawing of Satan
illustrating the Codex Griga (13th century)
(http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/File:Codex_Gigas_devil.jpg). ( Huguette Legros, Le diable
et l'enfer : représentation dans la sculpture romane, OpenEdition Books Presses universitaires de
Provence, available at: http://books.openedition.org/pup/2668?lang=fr;;en, accessed on 20
December 2016)
As for the Satan wearing the horns of a goat, which is now part of the "popular" imagination, it derives
from and hardly predates the drawing of the "Mendes goat" with which Eliphas Levi decorated his
"Dogme et rituel de haute magie"
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horned_God#/media/File:Baphomet.png).
(69) On the basis of a detailed textual analysis, biblical scholars have come to the conclusion that most
of the books of the Old Testament were compiled from a number of different texts written by various
priests over a period of several hundred years beginning around the beginning of the eighth century
BC. The first of the texts, known as the J-text, was written by a member or members of the Aaronite
priesthood in Jerusalem and contained an account of events from Creation to the arrival of the
Israelites in Canaan. The narrative, written from a
Aaronite, emphasised the importance of Aaron and the priests who descended from him and put into
perspective the role of Moses, from whom their rivals, the Shilohs, claimed descent. The text, which
comes very close to what became the first four books of the Torah, also included the first code of the
law
Hebrew, including a long list of rules relating to areas ranging from clothing to
food, which enabled the Aaronite priesthood to establish its authority over Hebrew worship. The second
text, Text E, written in reaction to Text J by the Shiloh priests in the Northern Kingdom, provides a similar
historical account, but contains a different code of laws and emphasises the role of Moses, while
downplaying that of Aaron. In the period following the destruction of the Northern Kingdom by the
Assyrians in 720 BC, when Jerusalem was flooded with refugees from the North, the two texts were
grouped together, mainly with the aim of facilitating the assimilation of the refugees with the people
of Judah. At the end of the 7th century BC, King Josiah initiated religious reforms aimed a t
standardising Hebrew worship according to the rituals of the Temple in Jerusalem, controlled by the
Aaronite priesthood. As a result, the Aaronites drew up a new version of the JE text, known as the P
text, in which they reaffirmed their point of view, ridding it of the texts that went in the direction of
the priests of Shiloh. In response, a member of the priesthood of Shiloh, thought by many scholars to
be Jeremiah, composed a lengthy historical account that spanned from the arrival of the Israelites in
Canaan to the invasion of Nebuchadnezzar, the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple and the exile
of the Israelites to Babylon. The text, referred to by scholars as the "Deuteronomistic History", includes
the book o f Deuteronomy as well as the books of Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings.
After the Persians
had defeated Babylon and the Israelites had been freed from captivity, the Persian monarch, Artaxerxes,
appointed Ezra, a member of the priesthood of Aaron, religious leader of the Israelites, an act that
definitively gave the priests of Aaron control over Hebrew worship practices. In the years
In the following years, a writer whom scholars call R, or the editor, perhaps Ezra himself and certainly a
member of Aaron's priesthood, compiled the texts anew, modified them, edited them and grouped
them together in the first four books of the Torah. At the same time, he added eleven chapters to
Genesis, made the book of Exodus twice as long, composed the greater part of the
Book of Numbers and wrote the whole of Leviticus. He then integrated the books of Deuteronomistic
History with the other texts and organised the whole into the books of the Bible as we know them today.
Around the same time, an Aaronite scribe added I and II Chronicles, which offers a response
The books of Ezra and Nehemiah take up the historical narrative, with the return of the Israelites from
exile, the rebuilding of the Temple and the reconstitution of the nation of Israel, from an entirely
Aaronite perspective. The books of Ezra and Nehemiah take up the historical narrative, with the
return of the Israelites from exile, the rebuilding of the Temple and the reconstitution of the nation of
Israel, from an Aaronite perspective. The other books of the Bible, the books of the prophets and the
books of wisdom, were compiled from many other sources, including the writings of the prophets
themselves and other texts handed down through the generations.
(70) R.E. Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible?, Harper Collins, 1997.
(71) Isaiah, 6:13, 17:8, 27:9.
(72) Christopher L.C.E. Witcombe, op. cit.
(73) 1 Kings, 21:25.
(74) 1 Kings, 16:31-33.
(75) Oxford English Dictionary.
(76) American Heritage Dictionary.
(77) Rictor Norton, A History of Homophobia, 1: The Ancient Hebrews,
http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/homopho1.htm , p. 71 ; David F. Greenberg, op. cit. p. 139-
141.
(78) David F. Greenberg, op. cit. p. 139-140.
(79) For example, 1 Kings, 14:23-24, in the Hebrew original of which the term "to-ebah", "idolater", is used.
"The term "ritually impure" is used in reference to the activities of the kadesh.
(80) Louis M. Epstein, op. cit. p. 4.
(81) In addition to the passages of Scripture quoted here, see David F. Greenberg, op. cit. p. 136
note 49, who lists others relating to the sin of Sodom understood as an inhospitable or cruel
attitude towards guests or travellers: Deuteronomy, 29:23, 32:32; Isaiah, 1:9-10, 3:9, 13:19;
Jeremiah, 23:14, 49:18, 50:40; Lamentations, 4:6; Amos, 4:11.
(82) Luke, 10:10-12.
(83) Many biblical exegetes reject the hypothesis that, in this passage, "to know
"According to these specialists, the incident was due to the fact that Lot, who was not a citizen of the
city but a foreigner who lived there and had no rights, had brought two men into the city. According
to these specialists, the incident can be explained by the fact that Lot, who was not a citizen of the
town but a foreigner residing there with no rights, had introduced two "homosexuals" into the house.
strangers without permission. According to this interpretation, the men were simply trying to find out
who these strangers were. It seems to be fully confirmed by the fact that, in the Bible, "yadha", the
verb "to know" used in the verse in question, is used in more than nine hundred other biblical
passages in the sense of "to make the acquaintance of" and only ten times in the sense of "to know".
to have sexual relations". However, Lot's offer to give them his two virgin daughters at the
the place of the two angels implies that Lot had understood that they were going to have sexual relations
with them
(Rictor Norton, op. cit.) (our two homosexual authors, Norton and Neill, did not consider the possibility
that Lot, knowing their attraction to women, had made them this offer in the hope that it would cause
them to lose sight of the fact that they had asked him to bring the two angels out of his house for "
to know" in the sense of "to become aware of their identity" [N.D.E.])
(84) Vern L. Bullough, op. cit. p. 83; Derrick Sherwin Bailey, Homosexuality and the Western
Christian Tradition, Longmans, Green, London, 1955.
and Co, 1955 pp. 8-27; Robin Scroggs, The New Testament and Homosexuality, Fortress Press,
Philadelphia, 1983, p. 85-98.
(85) Judges, 19:22-30.
(86) 1 Samuel, 16:12-23.
(87) Ibid.
(88) 1 Samuel, 18:1-4.
(89) 1 Samuel, 18:21 (literally: "by two", as stated in The Inclusive Hebrew Scriptures, vol. 2: The
Prophets , Altamira Press, p. 115. The Segond Bible is therefore wrong to translate this passage as "...
said to David for the second time, Today you will become my son-in-law").
(90) 1 Samuel, 18:5.
(91) 1 Samuel, 20:30-34.
(92) 1 Samuel, 20:41.
(93) 2 Samuel, 1:26 (again, this is a "chaste" translation of David's sadness). Other translations, closer
to the Hebrew text, notably that of André Chouraqui, are less watered down:
"Jonathan, my brother, you were so charming to me! Your love was more wonderful to me than the
love of women. Finally, an ambiguity in the Hebrew vocabulary also makes it possible to translate:
"Jonathan, my brother, you were full of charms for me! (Odon Vallet, Jésus et Bouddha: Destins
croisés du christianisme et du bouddhisme,
Albin Michel, 1999 [N.D.E.])
(94) Anne Draffkorn Kilmer, op. cit. p. 130 (See also Gilgamesh: A Reader, John R. Maier, p. 85).
(95) John Boswell, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, Villard Books, New York, 1994, p. 135.
(96) Ibid.
(97) 2 Samuel, 9:1-13.
(98) Tom Horner, op. cit. p. 31-32. For a detailed examination, supported by quotations, of the
translation of the passage in the Septuagint and in the Massoretic text by some twenty biblical
exegetes, see Bruce L. Gerig, "Saul's Sexual Insult and David's Losing it: Homosexuality and the Bible,
Supplement",
The Epistle: a Web Magazine for Christian Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgenderal People,
http://epistle.us/hbarticles/saulinsultdaveloseit1.html.
(99) Ibid.
(100) John Boswell, op. cit. p. 136-137.
(101) Tom Horner, op. cit. p. 28.
(102) Quoted in Tom Horner, op.cit. p. 39.
(103) Daniel, 1:9.
(104) David F. Greenberg, op. cit. p. 121.
(105) Allen Edwardes, The Jewel in the Lotus, A Historical Survey of the Sexual Culture of the East,
Julian Press, New York, 1959, p. 189.
(106) David F. Greenberg, op. cit. p. 122 (see Vincent Azoulay. "Xenophon, le roi et les eunuques:
Généalogie d'un monstre?" Revue Française d'Histoire des Idées Politiques, L'Harmattan, 2000, 11, pp. 3-
26; available at https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00268761/document, accessed 20 December
2016; Dominique Lenfant, "Le mépris des eunuques dans la Grèce classique: orientalisme ou
anachronisme?" In A. Queyrel Bottineau (ed.), La représentation négative de l'autre dans l'antiquité.
Hostilité, réprobation, dépréciation, Editions Universitaires de Dijon, Dijon, 2014,
available at the following address
http://dominiquelenfant.free.fr/pdf/2014.Lenfant.Mepris%20des%20eunuques.pdf, consulted on 20
December 2016 [N.D.E.])
(107) Ibid.
(108) John Maxwell O'Brien, Alexander the Great: The Invisible Enemy, Routledge, New York, 1994,
p. 112.
(109) Daniel, 1:3.
(110) Odyssey, 14:297, 15:449.
(111) Joel, 4:3. For an analysis of the translation problems of this passage, see Tom Horner, op. cit,
p. 68.
(112) David F. Greenberg, op. cit. p. 122 note.
(113) Ibid, p. 121 note.
(114) Ezra, 7:26.
(115) By appointing Ezra religious leader of the Jews and sending him back to Jerusalem with sufficient
funds to exercise his authority, Artaxerxes was not only being magnanimous towards the Jews, he also
had specific political objectives in mind. In 460 BC, a Greek confederation led by Athens had defeated
the Persians at Memphis and seized much of the coast of Palestine and Phoenicia, posing a serious
military threat to the Persian Empire. The establishment of a strong pro-Persian religious and civil
power in Judea was intended to act as a bulwark against Greek incursions from the Palestinian coast.
(116) Louis M. Epstein, op. cit. p. 7.
(117a) The Testament of Patriarch Reuben, 1:21.
(117b) If, in the post-exilic writings, it appears that the woman begins to be effectively presented as the
personification of evil, of Israel in a state of sin, for reasons that do not appear in the post-exilic writings,
it is because the woman is the personification of Israel in a state of sin.
This is not only due to the participation of Jewish women in the orgiastic rituals of the Canaanite
religion, but also to the radically different image given of them in the pre-exilic writings, in which they
are generally portrayed not as temptresses but as victims of "transgressions".
(Alice A. Keefe, Woman's Body and the Social Body in Hosea 1-2, Sheffield
Academic Press, London - New York, 2002, p. 167). In Genesis 34, Judges 19 and 2 Samuel 13, it is not
the woman but the rape of the woman that causes social chaos. Moreover, the woman's body
symbolises the social body in Judges 19 (see ibid., p. 175).
(118) Louis M. Epstein, op. cit. p. 7.
(119) John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality, University of Chicago
Press, Chicago, 1980, pp. 100-102; Tom Horner, op. cit; David F. Greenberg, op. cit, pp. 135-141;
Rictor
Norton, "Homophobia and the Ancient Hebrews". In Winston Leyland (ed.), Gay Roots: An Anthology
of Gay History, Sex, Politics and Culture, Gay Sunshine Press, San Francisco, 1993, pp. 70-71.
(120) Some scholars believe it is possible that the ancient Hebrews were also influenced by the strict
religious precepts of the Zoroastrian religion of their Persian benefactors, which placed great
importance on reproduction and condemned all sexuality not oriented towards procreation, including
homosexual practices. Given the Israelites' weakening as a nation, such a ban might have been
considered desirable. However, as
As mentioned above, the Zoroastrian prohibition of homosexuality was formulated in the Vendidad,
which was not written until the 3rd century BC, apparently two centuries after an identical prohibition
had been inserted in Leviticus.
(121) Rictor Norton, op. cit. p. 71; other examples of the use of to-ebah in reference to idols or non-
Jewish cults can be found in Deuteronomy, 7:25-26; 17:2-5; 13:12-15; 12:31; 18:9-12.
(122) John Boswell, op. cit. p. 100.
(123) Victor Paul Furnish, "The Bible and Homosexuality: Reading the Texts in Context". In Jeffrey
S. Siker (ed.), Homosexuality in the Church: Both Sides of the Debate, Westminster John Knox
Press,
Louisville, KY, 1994, p. 20.
(124) The various attempts to clarify the meaning of "miskebe issa" have not succeeded in doing so.
starting with that of Neill, only to confuse the problem even more. We will try to put it clearly: if the
writers of Leviticus had intended to condemn, purely and simply
male homosexuality, they would have said: "Thou shalt not lie with a man", but they wrote
You shall not lie with a man as one lies with a woman", i.e. "you shall not have sexual intercourse with a
man as one has sexual intercourse with a woman". So w h a t would be condemned here is not the fact
that a man has sexual intercourse with a woman, but the fact that a woman has sexual intercourse with
a man.
another man, it would be the fact of a man having sexual intercourse with another man, behaving like
a man towards a woman, in other words playing an active role in relation to his male partner. This
reading, which is syntactically logical, is culturally absurd, insofar as in all societies where male
homosexuality was widespread from antiquity to the "
In the "Middle Ages", active homosexuality was valued over passive homosexuality. However, "miskebe
issa" has a meaning that may resolve the difficulty posed by the translation
literal translation of the verse: "the state of a woman being penetrated", or more simply "vaginal
receptivity" (Saul M. Olyan, Social Inequality in the World of the Text, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
Göttingen, 2011, p. 62). Leviticus 18-22 could thus be rendered as "Thou shalt not lie with a man in the
state of a woman being penetrated" and would thus constitute a condemnation of passive
homosexuality alone.
In passing, it has been argued (ibid., p. 63) that the homosexual practice referred to in this passage
is not necessarily that of anal intercourse.
(125) Jewish scholars of later times still interpreted "kadesh" in the sense of "a place of worship".
homosexual", as shown by Sanhedrin, a treatise in the Babylonian Talmud containing laws relating to
civil and criminal law. Rabbi ben Elsiha, who taught in the first half of the second century AD,
interpreted the prohibition of kadesh in Deuteronomy as a general condemnation of passive sodomy.
The commentary by Rashi (1040 - 1105) also gives "kadesh" the meaning "to be able to do one's own
business".
homosexual" (Louis Crompton, op. cit., p. 43).
(126) Robert A. Di Vito, "Questions on the Construction of (Homo) sexuality: Same-Sex Relations in
the Hebrew Bible". In Beattie Jung, Joseph Andrew Coray (eds.), Sexual Diversity and Catholicism:
Toward the Development of Moral Theology, the Liturgical Press, Collegeville, MN, 2001, pp. 114-
116; Victor Paul Furnish, "The Bible and Homosexuality: Reading the Texts in Context". In Jeffrey S.
Siker (ed.),
Homosexuality in the Church: Both Sides of the Debate, Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, KY,
1994, p. 20. On the cultic connotations of "zakar", see the detailed analysis, supported by
numerous Scripture quotations, from Bruce L. Gerig, "Homosexuality and the Bible: the Levitical Ban: A
Mysterious Puzzle". In The Epistle: a Web Magazine for Christian Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and
Transgenderal People, available at http://epistle.us/homobible.html and
http://epistle.us/hbarticles/zakhar2.html.
(127) Louis M. Epstein, op. cit. p. 3-4.
(128) Robin Scroggs, The New Testament and Homosexuality, Fortress Press, Philadelphia, 1983, p. 92-.
94. Among the texts cited by Scroggs that condemn homosexual practices as idolatrous are the
Letter of Aristaeus, The Wisdom of Solomon, the Sibylline Oracles and The Testaments of the
Twelve Patriarchs.
(129) Rictor Norton, op. cit. p. 71.
(130) Bernard Bamberger, "Leviticus". In W. Gunther Plaut (ed.) The Torah: A Modern
Commentary, Union of American Hebrew Congregations, New York, 1981, p. 881; Rictor Norton,
op. cit., p. 71.
(131) 1 Maccabees, 14-15; 49.
The bourgeois mythology of the Enlightenment
If Jacques de Mahieu's books, whether those dealing with 'mysterious archaeology' (all translated into
French) or, even more so, those of interest to us here, i.e. those on
on race and the history of ideas, have been republished almost non-stop in Argentina since the death
o f this highly penetrating mind, although mysteriously none of them has ever been published in
French translation. The publication of QUI Suis-Je? Jacques de Mahieu (Pardès, 2018) unfortunately
did nothing to change this. Maurras et Sorel fills this gap.
Maurras y Sorel (La Editorial Virtual, 1968), as the author indicates in a preliminary note, brings together
three essays first published in the Boletïn de estudios franceses, edited by the Argentinian historian and
journalist Alberto Falcionelli (1910-1995) of the Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, on the occasion of the
bicentenary of the Encyclopédie, which the university was keen to "celebrate in its own way". He
These are "La mitologia burguesa del 'siglo de las luces'" (1950), "La Contra Enciclopedia
Contemporánea - Maurras y Sorel" (1952) and "La Tour du Pin - precursor de la tercera posición"
(1952).
In Révolte contre le monde moderne (1934) and, in fact, as early as Impérialisme païen (1928), Evola had
traced the process of caste regression, drawing on data provided by Guénon. "The
bourgeois mythology of the Enlightenment" offers an analysis of the many converging factors in the
involutive transfer of power from the aristocracy to the merchant and financial bourgeoisie in the
eighteenth century. An extract is given below.
At a time when, on the occasion of yet another republican electoral episode (*), the Trotskyitecapitalist
hydra - in other words, and to use Maurras' expression, the anti-France - is unleashed in the
media, while intriguing behind the scenes, the 'third way' has probably never been more topical.
I. THE BOURGEOIS MYTHOLOGY OF THE "CENTURY OF ENLIGHTENMENT
1. Society in the 18th century
From a social and political point of view, the 18th century, or more precisely the period between the
death o f Louis XIV in 1715 and the convening of the Estates-General in 1789, was a difficult time for
the country.