Page:Homo-sexual Life by William John Fielding (1925).pdf/33

 not yet satisfactorily solved, must to the primitive intelligence have appeared even more inexplicable than to us; and a man born with the inclination toward his own sex must have been regarded as something extraordinary, as one of those strange freaks of Nature which among Primitives are so easily accounted divine marvels and honored as such. The by no means scanty supply of ethnological facts on this subject which we possess confirms the above view, and shows in what odor of sanctity homosexual individuals have often stood among Nature-folk—for which reason they frequently played an important part in religious rituals and festivals."

It was the theory of Adolf Bastian, a German authority, that the priests among early peoples, as representatives of the bisexual principle in Nature, encouraged homosexual rites in the temples on the same footing as heterosexual rites.

"The men," stated Bastian, "prayed to the powers of Nature, and the women, in privacy and retirement, to the feminine powers—while the priests, who had to satisfy the demands of both parties, learned the idea of sex changes from the Moon, and served the masculine gods in masculine attire, and the goddesses in feminine garments, or set up images of a bearded-Venus and of a Hercules active as spinning at the wheel."

Practically all the ancient deities, at one time or another, seem to have been invested with bisexual characters. Even Venus or Aphrodite was sometimes worshipped in the dual form. Frazer in his Adonis, etc., states that in Cyprus