[FN#365] The Arabic Sabhakah, the Tractatrix or Subigitatrix who has been noticed in vol. iv. 134.  Hence to Lesbianise ( ) and tribassare ( ); the former applied to the love of woman for woman and the latter to its mecanique:  this is either natural, as friction of the labia and insertion of the clitoris when unusually developed, or artificial by means of the fascinum, the artificial penis (the Persian “Mayajang"); the patte de chat, the banana-fruit and a multitude of other succedanea.  As this feminine perversion is only glanced at in The Nights I need hardly enlarge upon the subject.

[FN#366] Plato (Symp.) is probably mystical when he accounts for such passions by there being in the beginning three species of humanity, men, women and men-women or androgynes.  When the latter were destroyed by Zeus for rebellion, the two others were individually divided into equal parts.  Hence each division seeks its other half in the same sex, the primitive man prefers men and the primitive woman women.  C’est beau, but—­is it true?  The idea was probably derived from Egypt which supplied the Hebrews with androgynic humanity, and thence it passed to extreme India, where Shiva as Ardhanari was male on one side and female on the other side of the body, combining paternal and maternal qualities and functions.  The first creation of humans (Gen. i. 27) was hermaphrodite (=Hermes and Venus), masculum et foeminam creavit eos—­male and female created He them—­on the sixth day, with the command to increase and multiply (ibid. v. 28), while Eve the woman was created subsequently.  Meanwhile, say certain Talmudists, Adam carnally copulated with all races of animals.  See L’Anandryne in Mirabeau’s Erotika Biblion, where Antoinette Bourgnon laments the undoubling which disfigured the work of God, producing monsters incapable of independent self-reproduction like the vegetable kingdom.

[FN#367] De la Femme, Paris, 1827.

[FN#368] Die Lustseuche des Alterthum’s, Halle, 1839.

[FN#369] See his exhaustive article on (Grecian) “Paederastie” in the Allgemeine Encyclopaedie of Ersch and Gruber, Leipzig, Brockhaus, 1837.  He carefully traces it through the several states, Dorians, AEolians, Ionians, the Attic cities and those of Asia Minor.  For these details I must refer my readers to M. Meier; a full account of these would fill a volume not the section of an essay.

[FN#370] Against which see Henri Estienne, Apologie pour Herodote, a society satire of xvith century, lately reprinted by Liseux.

[FN#371] In Sparta the lover was called           or         x
and the beloved as in Thessaly       or     x.

[FN#372] The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.  Zeus, who became Jupiter, was an ancient king, according to the Cretans, who were entitled liars because they showed his burial-place.  From a deified ancestor he would become a local god, like the Hebrew Jehovah