“Among the women I saw some men dressed like women, with whom they go about regularly, never joining the men. The commander called them amaricados, perhaps because the Yumas call effeminate men maricas. I asked who these men were, and they replied that they were not men like the rest, and for this reason they went around covered in this way. From this I inferred that they must be hermaphrodites but from what I learned later I understood that they were sodomites, dedicated to nefarious practices. …I conclude that in this matter of incontinence there will be much to do when the Holy Faith and the Christian religion are established among them.”Fray Pedro Font, Font’s Complete Diary of the Second Anza Expedition 1775-1776

For this post, I’m going to briefly summarise some themes in contemporary scholarship relating to eighteenth century attitudes to sex and gender, which underwent great changes throughout the century. This is useful for understanding eighteenth century accounts of shamanism, as many of these accounts throughout the century increasingly focused on what we would now call “gender-variance” as a marker for shamanic behaviour. Several scholars have argued that due to changes in the way sexuality and gender were understood in eighteenth-century European culture, contact accounts of primitive cultures shifted from a general representation of whole cultures being inclined towards same-sex relations towards an increased focus upon same-sex desires as a special case – that of the “effeminate sodomite”. According to Rudi Bleys (1996):

The actual or presumed coincidence of cross-gender roles with same-sex praxis made the former instrumental to new sexual theory in Europe that locked sodomy inexorably into the corset of femininity. Passivity, more particularly, as located in the receptive use of the anus, became quintessential to the ‘sodomite’ identity – a different idea, altogether, from previous notions of sodomy, which included the active partner as well as the passive one, men as well as women.(p81)

Mark Johnson (2009) argues that European encounters with males who dressed as women and engaged in women’s occupations were both fascinating and a source of consternation for European travellers, and that encounters with these “primitive” others were both shaped by, and themselves influenced changing discourses about the nature of sex and gender – in particular, informing what was to become the dominant image of homosexuality. I will look at some of these accounts in more detail in future posts, but for now I’m going to briefly examine the ideas of two influential theorists – Thomas Laqueur and Randolph Trumbach.

From one sex to two sexes?
The central argument of Thomas Laqueur’s Making sex: body and gender from the Greeks to Freud (1992) is that the understanding of the relationship between men and women underwent a major transformation over the course of the eighteenth century. Prior to this transformation, a ‘one-sex model’ was the dominant scheme, based on the idea that the body was composed of four humours – cold, hot, moist and dry – and that men were dominantly composed of hot and dry humours, and women by cold and moist humours – and that differences of sex were differences of degree. Semen, for example, was produced by bodily heat, and it was thought that women with too much bodily heat could produce semen and even, if they became too hot through excessive exercise, suddenly develop a penis. Menstruation was similarly understood not as something unique to women, but as an example of the body’s propensity to bleed in order to expell excess materials. Only one body existed, and it was represented as essentially male, and whilst females were thought of as “lesser males” with outside-in bodies; men and women were not considered to be radically different in terms of bodily constitution. Medical literature conceptualised the female body as an “inferior” version of the male body, with equivalences between testicles and ovaries; scrotum and uterus; foreskin and labia. Some physicians believed that men’s genitalia were externalised due to the heat of male bodies, which “drove” their organs outwards. Metaphysical understandings of the hierarchy of nature made men and women part of the same order, with men placed above women. However, whilst women becoming men due to excess heat was accepted, the notion that men could become women was not, due to the belief that nature tended towards perfection – and for a man to become a woman would be unnatural – the perfect becoming imperfect.

Laqueur argues that during the eighteenth century, this ‘one-sex model’ was replaced by a ‘two-sex model’ in which men and women became anatomically, opposites, radically different from each other:

“Thus the old [Galenic] model, in which men and women were arrayed according to their degree of metaphysical perfection, their vital heat, along an axis whose telos was male, gave way by the eighteenth century to a new model of radical dimorphism, of biological divergence. An anatomy and physiology of incommensurability replaced a metaphysics of hierarchy in the representation of woman in relation to man.”

Laqueur proposes that the “two-sex” model emerged primarily due to political changes and the decline of religious authority and not to medical discoveries. Laqueur proposes that in order to reinforce the political notion of natural rights, bodies were redefined in terms of opposite sexes. Power could only be formally granted to one group (men) and withheld from another group (women) if the two were distinct and incommensurable – and Political theorists turned to biology and medical treatises in order to justify this view in terms of emerging scientific discourse, rather than Adam’s dominance over Eve. So for example, The demotion of the pre-Englightenment metaphysical order took place at the same time as the fragmentation of social order:

“The rise of evangelical religion, Enlightenment political theory, the deveopment of new sorts of public spaces in the eighteenth century, Lockean ideas of marriage as a contract, the cataclysmic possibilities for social change wrought by the French revolution, postrevolutionary conservatism, postrevolutionary feminism. the factory system with its restructuring of the division of labour, the rise of a free market economy in services or commodities, the birth of classes, singly or in combination – none of these things caused the making of a new sexed body. Instead, the remaking of the body is itself intrinsic to each of these developments.” (1992, p11)

There is some debate amongst scholars over the timing of this shift to the “two-sex model” with some historians locating the shift beginning to occurr in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, whilst others have pointed out that this process was also historically uneven, with the single-sex and two-sex frameworks continuing to exist side-by-side for some time. Despite critiques however, Laqueuer’s work has had a considerable impact on contemporary studies of sexuality & gender.

Mollies: a third gender?
Randolph Trumbach, in his book Sex and the Gender Revolution proposes that:

“Around 1700 in northwestern Europe, in England, France and the Dutch Republic, there appeared a minority of adult men whose sexual desires were directed exclusively toward adult and adolescent males. These men could be identified by what seemed to their contemporaries to be effeminate behaviour in speech, movement and dress. They had not, however, entirely transformed themselves into women but instead combined into a third gender selected aspects of the behavior of the majority of men and women. Since a comparable minority of masculinised women who exclusively desired other women did not appear until the 1770s, it is therefore the case that for most of the eighteenth century there existed in northern Europe what might be described as a system of three genders composed of men, women, and sodomites”
(p3)

According to Trumbach, prior to the eighteenth century in European societies, same-sex desire between males was organised around differences in age, between active, adult men and passive boys – a pattern which he points out, was present in ancient Greece and Rome, and in early Christian Europe and in the later Middle Ages. Trumbach cites the work of Michael Rocke (see Forbidden Friendships) in demonstrating that in Renaissance Florence, sodomy was nigh on universal between men, but always structured by age. Trumbach points out that although sodomy was illegal, and the church spoke out against it as immoral “the actual sexual behaviour of men had changed very little from what it had been in the ancient pagan Mediterrranean world” (p5).

From the 1690s onwards, opinion changed from the old system, which was characterised by all males passing through a period of sexual passivity in adolescence, to a new system, wherein sexual passivity and homosexual desire was presumed to be indicative of an effeminate minority. These “new” adult sodomites were known colloquially as mollies – a term which, Trumbach says, was first applied to female prostitutes, and were charactised he argues, by playing two roles – one in the public world and another in the so-called “molly-house” inside which they took women’s names and adopted the speech and body movements of women. Historians have uncovered a well-established network of molly-house and open-air meeting places distributed throughout London in the early eighteenth-century. In addition to Mother Clap’s molly-house in Holborn, there were also houses near the Old Bailey and Newgate Prison, in Soho, Charing Cross, Drury Lane and St. James’s Square. A pamphlet attacking Charles Hitchins, a prominent thief-taker in London in the 1710s describes the behaviour inside a molly-house:

…they had no sooner entered but the Marshal was complemented by the company with the titles of Madam and Ladyship. The man asking the occasion of these uncommon devoirs, the Marshal said it was a familiar language common to the house. The man was not long there before he was more surprised than at first. The men calling one another ‘my dear’ and hugging, kissing and tickling each other as if they were a mixture of wanton males and females, and assuming effeminate voices and airs; some telling others that they ought to be whipped for not coming to school more frequently … Some were completely rigged in gowns, petticoats, headcloths, fine laced shoes, furbelowed scarves, and masks; some had riding hoods; some were dressed like milkmaids, others like shepherdesses with green hats, waistcoats and petticoats; and others had their faces patched and painted and wore very extensive hoop petticoats, which had been very lately introduced.”
(quoted in Hitchcock, p68)

Mollies became the focus of increased public scrutiny and condemnation, and some historians have argued that the Societies for the Reformation of Manners, which attacked effeminate sodomites in print, helped forge a link between the flouting of codes of masculine behaviour with the idea that such men were exclusively interested in sex with other men. These societies were concerned with social reform, particularly the elimination of blasphemy, idleness, and lewd and disorderly behaviour. They frequently relied on informers and agents to gather evidence, and although their most frequent targets were prostitutes, it is their attacks on molly houses (1699, 1707 and 1726) which has provided much of the historical evidence for the existence of molly culture. The Societies published trial reports, public sermons and accounts of their own activities, and from the late 1690s onwards there were frequent references to both molly-houses and sodomites in printed pamphlets and newspapers. Hitchcock points out that whilst the Reformation Societies closed down molly-houses, those men who were publicly exposed on the pillory were sometimes savagely treated by the London crowd – many were severely injured and some men died. (see secret sexualities for further discussion).

Men displaying effeminate mannerisms were increasingly subject to blackmail, persecution and punishment and it is argued that the increased emphasis on legal regulation also contributed to the idea that the sodomite was a distinct social and sexual type. Prior to the eighteenth century, the term “sodomite” encompassed a wide range of acts, but by the early eighteenth-century, it came to denote almost exclusively sexual acts between men. Trumbach discusses how many boys and men charged with sodomy were represented, at their trials as ‘mollies’ (regardless of whether or not they exhibited signs of effeminacy) and suffered the stigma and the harsh punishments associated with such an attribution. Such developments, he contends, obliged men to present their masculine status exclusively through their interest in women – and sex ceased to be represented as that which took place between an active and passive partner (regardless of gender) but as an act between men and women.

As the eighteenth century progressed, sodomy and effeminacy came under increasing scientific scrutiny. Some social theorists interpreted same-sex desire as being produced by luxury, excess and idleness – an explanation which pointed not only to modern European cultures, but also “primitive” societies (see previous post for some related discussion). The sailor John Marra for example, in his Journal of the Resolution’s Voyage in 1772, 1773, 1774 and 1775 on Discovery in the Southern Hemisphere (published in London in 1775) described the polynesians as “an effeminate race, intoxicated with pleasure, and enfeebled by indulgence” (Wilson, 2004, p351). Effeminacy could also be a product of cultures where men spent too much time around women, or as John Millar theorised, societies where women had too much political or social status.

Sources
Rudi Bleys, The Geography of Perversion: Male-to-male Sexual Behaviour outside the West and the Ethnographic Imagination 1750-1918 (Cassell, 1996)
Martin B. Duberman (ed) A queer world: the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies reader (New York University Press, 1997)
Karen Harvey, Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Bodies and Gender in English Erotic Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2004)
Tim Hitchcock English Sexualities, 1700-1800 (Palgrave Macmillan, 1997)
Thomas Laqueur Making sex: body and gender from the Greeks to Freud (Harvard University Press, 1992)
Mark Johnson Transgression and the Making of ‘Western’ Sexual Sciences in Donnan, Magowan (eds) Transgressive sex: subversion and control in erotic encounters (Berghahn Books, 2009)
Bradford Mudge (ed) When Flesh Becomes Word: An Anthology of Early Eighteenth-Century Libertine Literature (Oxford University Press, 2004)
Kim M. Phillips & Barry Reay Sex before Sexuality: A Premodern History (Polity Press, 2011)
Michael Rocke Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (Oxford University Press 1996)
Will Roscoe Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America (St. Martin’s Press, 2000)
Rousseau, Porter (eds) Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment (Manchester University Press, 1987)
Randolph Trumbach Sex and the Gender Revolution: Heterosexuality and the third gender in Enlightenment London v. 1 (University of Chicago Press, 1998)
Kathleen Wilson (ed) A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840 (State University of New York, 2004)

Sharada Sugirtharajah’s Imagining Hinduism: A Postcolonial Perspective (Routledge, 2003 – also available for Adobe Digital Editions and Kindle) examines how “Hinduism” has been defined and interpreted via Western categorisations from the eighteenth century to the present day. Sugirtharajah examines how western fascination with India has ranged from romantic admiration to outright ridicule, and how at the same time, Indian reformers drew upon orientalist representations in order to formulate a unified Hindu identity. Focusing on the work of two scholars – William Jones and Max Muller; two missionaries – William Ward and Nichol Farquhar and a western reading of the 1987 Sati case, Sugirtharajah ably demonstrates how Western constructions of Hinduism by orientalists and missionaries produced a Hinduism which, to a large extent, confirmed their own “theological and ideological suppositions”. Of the value of the postcolonial approach, she says: Postcolonial theory is useful in that it reveals the link between knowledge and power and between representation and mediation, and highlights homogenizing, essentializing and universalizing tendencies in varied discourses, reading and interpretative strategies.

Following a brief discussion of the historical usage of the term “Hinduism” particularly by orientalists to create the notion of a homogenised (and thereby managable) religion, the first chapter examines the work of William Jones and his attempts to reconcile Indian ancient texts with a biblical chronology; his poetic romanticisation of Indian deities (which nonetheless locks Hinduism into a primitive “pagan” past) and his desire to reshape and discipline Hindu laws along Justinian lines. Sugirtharajah then turns her attention to Max Muller, famous for his translation of the Vedas and pioneer of comparative religion and mythology.Sugirtharajah argues that Muller was instrumental in creating a “textual” Hinduism which was informed by nineteenth century ideas of evolution and comparative philology. Muller, like Jones and other orientalists, believed that contemporary Hindus had become detached from the original meanings of their religion, and that he could provide a “corrective” reading which would benefit both colonised and colonisers alike. Muller, locates India’s “greatness” in its remote past, and romanticises India’s static, timeless nature in the quest for European orgins and the rural idyll.

The third chapter focuses on the nineteenth century missionary William Ward and his relentless denunciation of Hindu religion and morals. Ward is of course, well-known also for his description of “tuntra” in his 1817 work (title) as “things too abominable to be revealed to a Christian public”. Unsurprisingly, Ward sees finds no coherence in Indian beliefs and practices, religious or otherwise, and he sees Indians as “effeminate” worshipping deities – “monsters of vice” – which “encourage immoral behaviour.” Sugirtharajah then turns to another missionary, the Scottish Nichol Farquhar, whose 1913 book The Crown of Hinduism argued for an “inclusivist” approach to Hinduism. So, rather than Ward’s blanket rejection of anything Hindu, Farquhar instead views Hinduism as “imperfect” – requiring its fulfilment in Christianity. Thus his inclusivism can only grant a secondary or lower status to Hinduism, and Hinduism only becomes meaningful when interpreted through the lens of Protestant Christianity.

The fifth chapter, Courtly text and Courting Sati examines the topic of Sati (“widow immolation”) by critiquing the work of a contemporary scholar, Julia Leslie – specifically, her essay “Suttee or sati: victim or victor” in Roles and Rituals for Hindu Women and prompted by the highly publicised death of an eighteen-year old woman, Roop Kanwar, in Rajasthan in 1987. The crux of Sugirtharajah’s argument here is that Leslie interprets this event using an eighteenth-century sanskrit text whose author, needless to say, sets a high value on sati. What is problematic here, according to Sugirtharajah is that by privileging such a brahminical text in creating an account of ideal Indian womanhood, Leslie ignores other accounts of womanhood (which don’t view women as subservient and passive) and unwittingly reinforces the notion that Hindu religion and culture is static and unchanging. This is a difficult, yet thought-provoking chapter.

The final chapter deals with how some features of orientalist representations of Hinduism continue to be replicated in postcolonial contexts: Ironically, Hindus are using more or less the very same tools used by Western scholars of Hinduism in order to clear up misconceptions and present a homogenized view of Hinduism. What is conspicuous is that Hindus living outside India are now drawing on the Western orientalist conception of religion as a unified category in order to make Hinduism intelligible to both insiders and outsiders. (p134). Sugirtharajah examines some features of movements such as ISKON and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) in forging a universalised Hinduism. Sugirtharajah also points to some of the ideas which arise through the course of her book – for example, that the concept and theorisation of religion is itself problematic due to its Western Christian theological presuppositions – and in particular its bias towards textual sources:

Religion, to the ordinary Hindu, is not simply confined to texts or to a prescribed set of beliefs. It includes these aspects yet it encompasses a wide variety of other areas such as art, dance, music and folklore; post-Enlightenment scholars of religion, however, take little note of these non-textual domains. There is a marked reluctance to shift the focus from texts. Even a cursory glance at some of the current introductory material on Hinduism reflects a predominantly text-oriented approach. It is largely through the lens of brahminical textual and ritual traditions that Hinduism is perceived. In other words, textual Hinduism is given primary consideration. (p140)

What I found particularly useful was Sugirtharajah’s focus on the orientalist pursuit and production of knowledge (pace Said and Foucault) and how this is inextricably linked with colonial expansion and conquest – so that the translation of texts such as The Laws of Manu and Muller’s Sacred Books of the East were both supported by the East India Company in order to exercise more effective control over the Indian population, and that “intellectual conquest” (to use Muller’s phrasing) was as much a concern of Empire as economic and military power. Sugirtharajah’s discussion of the binary dichotomies deployed by the missionaries Ward and Farquhar in order to both categorise and establish a hierarchical difference between Christianity and Hinduism is also useful. Imagining Hinduism highlights important issues such as the difficulty that western-based scholarship has had with dealing with a highly pluralistic culture; the problems of ethnocentric bias; and the problems of unreflexively applying western categorisations in interpreting a different culture.

All in all, this is an excellent, thought-provoking book that I find myself continually returning to.

“On my visit this Morning to Tynah and his Wife, I found with her a person, who altho I was certain was a Man, had great marks of effeminacy about him and created in me certain notions which I wished to find out if there were any foundations for. On asking Iddeah who he was, she without any hesitation told me he was a friend of hers, and a class of people common in Otaheite called Mahoo. That the Men had frequent connections with him and that he lived, observed the same ceremonies, and eat as the Women did. The Effeminacy of this persons speech induced me to think that he had suffered castration, and that other unnatural and shocking things were done by him, and particularly as I had myself some Idea that it was common in this sea. I was however mistaken in all my conjectures except that things equally disgusting were committed.”
William Bligh, The Log of the Bounty, 1789

At the end of the opening post in this series, I said I’d be taking a look at some Eighteenth Century accounts of shamanism and gender-variance. Before doing so however, I want to examine some broader transformations in the period which will, I hope, serve to place these accounts in context – specifically, discourses relating to sex, gender, and human varieties (i.e. race). These transformations were inextricably linked to encounters with the peoples of the New World, and these encounters (recorded or “imagined”) played a formative role in the establishment of European boundaries of normative sex and gender. As Mark Johnson (2009) points out: “Central to the changing terms and shifting ground of homosexual transgression in the West has been the figure of the gender-variant other, a recurrent and repeated leitmotiv of ethnological and sexological imaginings since the Enlightenment.”

For this post, I’m going to briefly focus on the relationship between climate and temperament – both in the New World and the Mediterranean which came to the fore in the eighteenth century.

In the first post in this series, I noted the linkage made between climate and effeminacy. Roxanne Wheeler, in her book The Complexion of Race explains the dominant conception of human variety as being rooted in the biblical account of creation – a theory of shared human origins now referred to as monogenesis – which led to assumptions that all peoples were originally born with white skins, and that variations were due to climate and lifestyle – and that the scientific term used to designate different groups of people was variety rather than race. She argues that religion and clothing were significant markers of similarity and difference, and that: “Climate and humoral theory, in one form or another, provided the most important rubric for thinking about human differences in the eighteenth century, in regard to both complexion and civil society”. Climactic theories of human variations became much more influential in the eighteenth century, with treatises such as Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws (1748) and Samuel Smith’s Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species (1787). Montesquieu asserted that peoples in hot climates were prone to lively and excitable passions, which led to a state of constant arousal and immoral behaviour. This, together with physical weakness and lassitude, entailed that the people were lazy and easily enslaved due to a lack of “strength of spirit”. Smith opines that all races came from a single creation, and that all subsequent racial difference is a result of climate. Savages – all of whom are, unless “urged by some violent passion” always indolent. Moreover, idleness is the cause of savagery, and a people can degenerate, into a darker race, if they live in a hot climate.

The inherent idleness of savage peoples was a recurrent theme throughout the period:

“They are, without doubt, both in Body and Mind, the laziest People under the Sun. A monstrous Indisposition to Thought and Action runs through all the Nations of ‘em: And their whole earthly Happiness seems to lie in Indolence and Supinity.”
Peter Kolb, Present State of the Cape of Good-Hope (1731)

Sarah Jordan, in The Anxieties of Idleness points out that the British saw industriousness as a virtue – and rationalised their entitlement to empire on the basis that they possessed the industriousness to make proper use of the land. African idleness became a justification for slavery. Similar views were made in regard to India. Thomas Salmon’s New Geographical and Historical Grammar (1772) says that “the warmth of these Eastern climates has doubtless ever contributed to the indolence and effeminacy of its inhabitants; and it may be doubted whether they ever had the industry and active spirits of the inhabitants of Europe, who found the necessity of labour for their support, which the Asiatics had less occasion for, through the luxuriancy of their soil.”

Similarly, Alexander Dow’s Dissertation Concerning the Origin and Nature of Despotism in Hindostan (1770) associates Indian hygiene and avoidance of alcohol as signs of idleness. “Habit makes the warm bath a luxury of a bewitching kind.” and “The prohibition of wine is also favourable to despotism. It prevents that free communication of sentiment which awakens mankind from a torpid indifference to their natural rights.”

The idea that climate could lead to degeneration and indolence for the colonisers as well as the colonised became a source of anxiety, and there were concerns that the British in India, for example, would succumb to the effeminising influences of the country, which intensified in the nineteenth century. Climactic theories persisted well into the nineteenth century – for example, in Richard Burton’s infamous concept of the Sodatic Zone which I will examine in more depth in due course.

Italian Vices
The influence of climate was not exclusively reserved for explaining the oddities of the New World. As I noted in my last post on Pan, the British were both attracted and repulsed by the erotic possibilities of Italy.

Paula Findlen’s engaging account (2009) of An Historical and Physical Dissertation on the Case of Catherine Vizzani, edited and published by John Cleland in 1751 provides some useful clues. This book, as Findlen explains, claimed to describe “The Adventures of a young Woman, born at Rome, who for eight years passed in the Habit of a Man, was killed for an Amour with a young Lady; and being found, on Dissection, a true Virgin, narrowly escaped being treated as a Saint. With some Curious and Anatomical Remarks on the Nature and Existence of the Hymen.” Despite the lurid possibilities of a tale of sex between women, cross-dressing and the pecularities of the Italians, the book was not apparently, a success. At the end of the volume, Cleland expresses the climatic view of Italy: “In a warm country like theirs, where Impurities of all Sorts are but too frequent, it may well happen that such strange Accidents may, from Time to Time, arise as highly to excite both their Wonder and their Attention.” The climatic values: laxity of morals, indolence, and religious transgressions were also applied to Italy (and France, to a lesser extent), and the popularity of the Grand Tour led to increased anxieties about about the effects on British moral values.

The anonymous author of Reasons for the Growth of Sodomy in England (1729) proferred the view that Italy was the “mother and nurse of sodomy” and linked the growth of sodomy to the growing popularity in England of Italian opera. Similar anxieties were expressed concerning the popularity of masquerade balls (for a brief discussion, see this article I wrote for The Bent Pentacle).

In the next post I’ll look at eighteenth century notions of sex and gender.

Sources
Paula Findlen, Wendy Wassyng Roworth and Catherine M. Sama Italy’s Eighteenth Century: Gender and Culture in the Age of the Grand Tour (Stanford University Press, 2009)
Mark Johnson Transgression and the Making of ‘Western’ Sexual Sciences in Donnan, Magowan (eds) Transgressive sex: subversion and control in erotic encounters (Berghahn Books, 2009)
Sarah Jordan, The Anxieties of Idleness: Idleness in Eighteenth Century British Literature and Culture (Bucknell University Press, 2004)
Thomas Laqueur Making sex: body and gender from the Greeks to Freud (Harvard University Press, 1992)
Robert P. Maccubbin (ed) ‘Tis nature’s fault: unauthorized sexuality during the Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 1987)
G.S. Rousseau Perilous enlightenment: pre- and post-modern discourses : sexual, historical (Manchester University Press, 1991)
Rousseau, Porter (eds) Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment (Manchester University Press, 1987)
Lee Wallace, Sexual encounters: Pacific texts, modern sexualities (Cornell University, 2003)
Roxanne Wheeler The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000)

“…it is no exaggeration to say that everyone interested in myth from the turn of the century to World War II was initially inspired or strongly influenced by reading The Golden Bough.” Robert Brockway, Myth from the Ice Age to Mickey Mouse (157)

Frazer’s work had a direct influence on Yeats and Margaret Murray, to name but two prominent names in the history of modern occultism, as well as Freud, Jung, Eliade, and Campbell.

Chas C. Clifton, in his contribution to Researching Paganisms laments the continued presence of Frazer (and others) in contemporary Pagan writing:

“Thinkers whom the contemporary academy regards as exhibits in the museum of ideas, such as the anthropologists Frazer and Bachofen, or Margaret Murray as historian of witchcraft, still loom large in contemporary Pagan writing, despite the critiques of academic Pagans. For example, the scanty bibliography of a rather vapid new work entitled Philosophy of Wicca lists Frazer’s The Golden Bough, Robert Graves’ White Goddess, and of course Margaret Murray, but not Ronald Hutton, Carlo Ginzberg, or any other deeply rooted contemporary historian. This author is not unique, unfortunately, and it is easy to conclude that an attitude of “don’t confuse me with new ideas” is at work.”(p93)

Whilst I’d agree, to some extent, with what Clifton is saying, I don’t think its quite as simple as the conclusion he offers.I don’t want to get into a sustained critique of Frazer – that’s been ably done by better people that I, although my principle problem with The Golden Bough is the way he blithely and uncritically lifts aspects of culture out of their social and historical contexts which give them meaning, as Ruth Benedict highlighted:

“Mating or death practices are illustrated by bits of behaviour selected indiscriminately from the most different cultures, and the discussion builds up a kind of mechanical Frankenstein’s monster with a right eye from Fiji, and a left from Europe, one leg from Tierra del Fuegom and one from Tahiti, and all the fingers and toes from still different regions. Such a figure corresponds to no reality past or present…” Patterns of Culture, 1934

Yet at the same time, I’d argue that this is precisely what makes Frazer’s work attractive to Pagans and Occultists – and that a great deal of occult writing is distinctly Frazerian in style (although often without his citations, which make it hard for a reader to chase up an author’s sources). Frazer is often criticised as being an “armchair anthropologist” – writing from the lofty position of an ivory tower, disengaged from having to deal with yer actual, living people. It strikes me that a lot of occult writing (in which I include my own work) uses a similar strategy, making sweeping generalisations (without Frazer’s acknowledgement of partiality) from the panoptic perspective of “occult truth”. What’s also attractive about Frazer is that he doesn’t burden the reader with what may be perceived as the unneccesary complications of modern anthropology – the discussions of theory; the all-too-often opaque language, the constant referencing of other theorists one is expected to be familiar with in order to get to grips with the author’s work. It’s easy to detach Frazer’s “data” from his own views, and treat it as self-evident evidence for one’s own argument.

A key theme underlying Frazer’s writing is that all “savage peoples” are pretty much the same. His impetus for writing The Golden Bough was to document savage people’s beliefs before they all died out in the triumphant march of civilisation, but not from the perspective that contemporary Pagans & Occultists tend to approach such cultures (be it respectful or romantic) – in order to learn from them or demonstrate out that they are “just like us, really” or for that matter, to establish a positive link between a myth in culture A, a “sacred specialist” in tribe B, and and a particular claim of self-identity – all strategies that have a tendency to cite The Golden Bough as evidential. Much of nineteenth-century anthropology is pragmatically oriented towards the concerns of colonial administrators – the people who need to understand the quaint beliefs of the primitive folk they are in charge of, in order to manage (and civilise them) more effectively. For Frazer and his colleagues, such as his mentor Tylor, the notion of sympathetically engaging with the conceptual framework of a different culture – one where people believed in magic, spirits, etc., was quite alien, and to them, an impossibility.

Frazer’s work is also heavily symbolic, showing the influence of Herbert Spencer’s assertion that the reality of nature is radically inaccessible to the human intellect. All that we can know of the world are the “feelings” which it somehow generates in our perceptual apparatus – perception therefore has nothing in common with that which provokes it: “the sensations produced in us by environing things are but symbols of actions out of ourselves, the natures of which we cannot even conceive.” (Spencer, 1862). For Frazer, social life is a kind of institutionalised expression of symbolism – a representation of something else, and his mission is one of decipherment or interpretation. The Golden Bough is like a never-ending hall of mirrors, with symbol being linked to symbol by analogy; a continual deferral of meaning. A symbol is always explained in terms of other symbols, which bear no relation to any real-world referent. Frazer openly acknowledges that the explanations he offers will never be definitive, they will always be conjunctural, partial: “All our theories concerning him [primitive man] and his ways must therefore fall far short of certainty; the utmost we can aspire to in such matters is a reasonable degree of probability.” It brings to mind the old joke that if all the sociologists in the world were laid from end to end they would never reach a conclusion, and certainly plays well to the exponents of cultural relativism in contemporary occulture, often expressed, as did a correspondent last year to me in terms of – “all we can do is speculate.” A great deal of occult writing uses the analogical mode in a similar way to Frazer – Kenneth Grant being just one example, with his fantastic leaps between gematria, fiction, mythology, symbolism, and “initiated” occult commentary.

What’s strange about contemporary Pagan deployments of Frazer, is that he’s generally antithetical to magic, although again, its not quite that simple. In his preface to the second edition of The Golden Bough (1900) he presents his view that magic is is fundamentally distinct and opposite to religion and also, “I believe that in the evolution of thought, magic as representing a lower intellectual stratum, has probably everywhere preceded religion.” (my italics) He also stresses that both magic and science share a similar worldview “In both of them the succession of events is perfectly regular and certain, being determined by immutable laws, the operation of which can be forseen and calculated precisely, the element of chance and of accident are banished from the course of nature.” Like many of his contemporaries, he believed that European “civilisation” was superior to all other cultures – particularly “savage” ones – he thought that magic was misguided “savage science” and that all cultures progressed from a magical worldview to a religious, and ultimately rational, scientific mentality. I can see that Frazer’s diametric opposition between magic and religion plays well to Pagans & Occultists who are equally keen to keep a distinction between the domains, and equally, his assertion that magic and science share a similar worldview (although he does think that magic is fundamentally a misunderstanding of scientific laws, and that savage peoples do not entertain any ideas about how magic “works”).

I mentioned, at the beginning of this post, that I’d been chasing up some of Frazer’s sources – particularly the group of Russian anthropologists who’s accounts of shamanism, like Frazer, widely referenced and cited – particularly in texts that seek to establish the global antecendencies of shamanism. Again, whilst these authors are heavily cited in passing, if you actually read their reports you get quite a different picture of their views on shamanism. Imagine this scenario: a group of anthropologists breeze into your local Pagan community, and later publish their findings, along the lines of – “Well there’s people called witches. A lot of them are neurotic and hysterical and given to strange fancies, and some of them are, well, sexual perverts. They believe in magic and spirits, but no one can take that seriously so we have to conclude that any effects from their magic is basically trickery or fraud.” Somehow I can’t see that kind of analysis getting cited in contemporary occult texts, yet that’s pretty much the tone I read from anthropologists such as Vladimir Bogoraz.

So then, are we still enthralled by the dazzling patterns of light displayed on the monolith, or can we – whilst acknowledging its influence – look past it towards the dizzying complexities of the world around us? Do we celebrate difference and diversity or blot them out in favour of finding safety in superficial comparison? It’s too easy to be dismissive of Frazer, but equally, its too easy to continually recycle him. Pete Carroll’s apt phrase “I’m sick of occult ideas which pass from book to book without any intervening thought” springs to mind.

Firstly, Sanskrit words, particularly philosophical and religious terms, have multiple meanings, many of which have changed over time – for example, the usage of the term Maya in the Rg Veda is quite different from its later usage in Advaita Vedanta. Moreover, interpretation of a term will depend on just who is doing the interpreting – be prepared for terms to be interpreted differently depending on whether the author is a Tantrika, Jain, Buddhist or Vedantin. Knowing the context in which a term appears is also important:

For any concept to have meaning one must know the context or, to put it differently, in order to have a concept one must have a whole world of concepts. No dictionary can free us from the effort of discovering a context which gives meaning.
A.T. de Nicolas, Professor Emeritus of philosophy at the State University of New York

Secondly, there is the issue of Vedic Science. From the nineteenth century onwards, there has been a trend of attempting to place South Asian philosophical & religious concepts on the same footing as western science. The identification of the chakra system described in the Satcakranirupana Tantra with nerve pleaxuses or glands as given by Arthur Avalon would be one example of this, but the so-called “Vedic Science Movement” was also championed by many western-influenced Hindu scholars, notably Swami Vivekananda. Reading the Vedas as “science”, exponents of this trend attempt to find analogies between scientific principles and concepts, and Hindu religious concepts. Further examples of this trend would be the equivalence of the three gunas with positive, negative, and neutrally-charged particles, or the idea that via their spiritual practices, yogis came to exactly the same conclusions as modern physicists as to the nature of the Universe.

Critics of this approach, such as Rajiv Malhotra, argue that the (mis)translation of Hindu religious ideas into terms familiar to Western science represent a form of neo-colonialism, whereby the original, complex of contextual meanings are lost, and instead replaced by a simplistic, fixed Eurocentric meaning.