Sir Richard Burton's Pederasty Essay:
An Introduction
by John Lauritsen
The literary sensation of 1885 was the publication in ten volumes of the Arabian Nights (full title, The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night),
translated by Sir Richard Burton. Although privately printed for 1000
subscribers, it circulated widely among the reading public, who were
lured by the promise of forbidden erotica. Burton included passages
which previous translators had omitted as indecent, and he translated them
without euphemisms. Hundreds of footnotes, perhaps the most celebrated
in English literature, displayed Burton's immense wealth of knowledge
about sexual behavior. On the whole critical reaction was highly
favorable, though moralists considered the Nights “morally
filthy”, fit only for “the sewers”.
The tenth volume contains a “Terminal
Essay”, of which an 18,000 word section, “Pederasty”,
deals with sex between males. This was the first openly published
discussion of all-male sexuality in English, and the weightiest to
appear in any language. Before Burton, Jeremy Bentham had written an
essay on pederasty in 1785 and Percy Bysshe Shelley had written an
essay, “A Discourse on the Manners of the Antient [sic] Greeks
Relative to the Subject of Love”, [1] in 1818, but neither essay was published until well into the 20th century.
In German, Heinrich Hössli had published a two-volume work entitled, Eros: Die Männerliebe der Griechen; ihre Beziehungen zur Geschichte, Erziehung, Literatur, and Gesetzgebung aller Zeiten (Eros: the Male Love of the Greeks; Its Relation to the History, Education, Literature and Legislation of All Ages)
(1836-1838). A major article on Greek and Roman pederasty by M.H.E.
Meier appeared in the Ersch and Gruber encyclopedia in 1837. Carl
Heinrich Ulrichs published a series of pamphlets, beginning in 1864.
But these works, with the possible exception of the
Ersch and Gruber entry, were known to very few. Burton's essay, in
contrast, was in the public spotlight.
From the wealth of information contained in the
“Terminal Essay” about how people in other cultures
practised and exalted same-sex love, an intelligent gay reader could
construct a powerful defense of his own orientation. But several
problems confront the reader. The essay seems to be written on
several
levels and from a variety of contradictory viewpoints. In a single
sentence, Burton extolls pederasty as “one of the marvellous list
of amorous vagaries” and then apparently condemns it as
“pathological love” which “deserved not prosecution
but the pitiful care of the physician and the study of the
psychologist.”
The obvious explanation for such irreconcilable
contradictions, which run throughout the essay, is that Burton was
doing an end run around British censorship, which was far more severe
than in the rest of Europe. Restrictions became tighter in the latter
part of the Nineteenth Century. For example, in 1877, Charles Bradlaugh
and Annie Besant were prosecuted for publishing a new edition of a
pamphlet on birth control that had been freely sold in England for
forty years. In 1888, the seventy-year-old publisher of an English
translation of Zola's La Terre was fined and imprisoned for three
months.
Perhaps unfortunately, Burton was so skillful in
flummoxing the censors, that he also confused many of his readers.
There are four main problems in reading his essay: 1) Burton employs
irony, which many readers are unable to detect, let alone understand,
2) he refers to pederasty in highly pejorative terms, giving the
superficial impression that he is hostile to all-male sexuality, 3) he
puts forward a convoluted theory of a “Sotadic zone”,
within which pederasty allegedly flourishes, and 4) he extensively uses
foreign languages, both ancient and modern. I'll deal with these
problems in turn.
One.
Part of being a good reader is to have an ear for irony — to know
whether a writer is being serious or facetious — to know when
words have a hidden meaning, intended for the initiated, which is
different from the literal meaning. Burton's stratagem was to write on
one level for the censors and Mrs. Grundy, and on another level for his
intended readers: those sympathetic to homoerotic freedom. Henry
Fowler, in his entry on irony, gives the following summation:
irony
in its more general sense may be defined as the use of words intended
to convey one meaning to the uninitiated part of the audience &
another to the initiated, the delight of it lying in the secret
intimacy set up between the latter & the speaker. [2]
Since the ability to grasp irony is crucial to understanding Burton's
essay, I have used footnote annotations of Burton's text to point
out a few examples. Also, I have reproduced Fowler's excellent entry on
irony in its entirety; to read it click here.
Two. At first glance, many of the terms by which Burton refers to pederasty seem extremely hostile:
execrabilis
familia pathicorum [accursed family of pathics], the Vice, pathological
love, perversion of the erotic sense, sodomy, the abuse, the evil, the
scandal, the flood of infamy, Le Vice, the erotic perversion,
criminality, a perversion, the corruption, infamies, depravity of
taste, etc.
At the same time, other words he uses are neutral or positive:
Sotadic
love, Sotadism, the love of boys, such affection, one of the marvellous
list of amorous vagaries, the practice, “Péché
philosophique”, “unnatural” affection (note the
quotation marks), male concubinage, etc.
On one level, the positive words offset the ostensibly negative ones,
especially when both occur in the same sentence or paragraph. Since
Burton sometimes describes pederasty with warm enthusiasm, we may
assume that he is writing tongue-in-cheek when referring to it as the
“terrible vice”. We recall that “vice”, the
most frequently used word, has been used ironically or playfully both
before and after Burton's time:
Vice is a monster of so frightful mien
As to be hated needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.
— Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Man”, II, 1732
Vice is nice, but incest is best.
(20th century playground or grafitto saying)
And of course, many words that would normally be negative can be
positive in context: for example, the New England saying, “It's
wicked good.” Among American blacks, “bad” can be
used to mean good.
Three.
Burton's essay begins by laying out a geographic theory about a
“Sotadic Zone,” approximately between latitudes 43 and 30
degrees, within which pederasty (his generic term for sex between
males) flourishes. However, geographically the “Sotadic
Zone” behaves very strangely, undergoing extreme contractions and
expansions; by the time the Sotadic Zone expands to include the entire
hemisphere of pre-Columbian America, it becomes a total reductio ad absurdum
from the standpoint of geography. Clearly something else is involved.
Burton denies that the Sotadic Zone could be explained on racial
grounds, and backs up his argument with evidence that within it all
races practice pederasty.
It becomes clear that the Sotadic Zone really
conforms to the zone outside Christendom, both in time and place, for
Burton's evidence establishes the boundaries of the Sotadic Zone as
theological, not geographic (though Burton doesn't say this directly).
Accordingly, much of the essay deals in comparative religion. Burton
demonstrates that historically the repression of sex between males is a
consequence of Judeo-Christian influence.
The Sotadic Zone serves several functions. It serves
as a red herring to lead the censors and other hostile readers astray.
It provides pseudo-scientific obfuscation for the real message of the
essay. It distances pederasty from the reader, making it something out
there and far away, exotic and unfamiliar, rather than something to be
found (except “sporadically”) in dear old England.
It is appalling that most academic readers of
Burton's essay have taken the Sotadic Zone literally. More than one gay
scholar has earnestly discussed the Sotadic Zone, perhaps even
belaboring its shortcomings — all the while assuming that Burton believed it himself. In fact, Burton had a wicked sense of
humor, which will be apparent to any good reader. Possessing a
brilliant and analytical mind, he could hardly have believed the
Sotadic Zone nonsense he concocted for the censors.
Four. Much of the essay is in foreign languages — Latin, ancient Greek, Arabic, French, German, and others — especially the most obscene passages. This could serve several functions. Burton may have thought that the censors were either lacking in language skills — or
even if not, that they would permit things to be said in Latin or
French that could not be said in English. I'm reminded of my old Loeb
edition of the Greek Anthology,
where the more risqué passages are translated from Greek —
not into English, but into Latin. The use of foreign languages, in
particular French and Latin, permits Burton to speak directly to his
intended readers, bypassing those less educated or sympathetic.
When I first thought of preparing an Internet
edition of Burton's pederasty essay, I intended to have all the foreign
passages translated into English. But I soon realized that this task
would require much more time and energy than I could spare, as well as
much assistance from others.
In summation: the “Terminal Essay” was
double-edged. The enlightened could read a powerful, well-documented
defence of male love, written with pride, relish, and even arrogance;
while the pious could cluck their tongues disapprovingly over the
“terrible vice”.
The “Terminal Essay” concludes with a
fierce attack on British censors. Burton's own attitude is expressed in
two Latin phrases in the penultimate paragraph: “Naturalia non sunt turpia” (“what is natural is not shameful”) and “Mundis omnia munda” (“To the pure, all things are pure”).
His final sentence: “It appears to me that
when I show to such men [a critic Burton is lambasting], so
‘respectable’ and so impure, a landscape of magnificent
prospects whose vistas are adorned with every charm of nature and art,
they point their unclean noses at a little heap of muck here and there
lying in a field corner.”
Burton's stratagems succeeded: the censors did not
suppress The Nights, though a decade later they banned Havelock
Ellis's Studies in the Psychology of Sex, and more than four decades later they banned the comparatively much tamer lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness.
Burton's final project was a new translation of the erotic classic, The Perfumed Garden, which he had previously translated from a French translation. For his new work, to be called The Scented Garden,
Burton went to the Arabic original, especially interested in
translating the passages on pederasty; these had never before been
rendered into a Western language. He intended to annotate it fully and
to write a preface on homosexuality, incorporating the ideas of Ulrichs
and others who had defended homosexual love. What had originally been a
small book grew into a manuscript of more than 1,282 pages, and he told
a friend, “I have put my whole life and all my life-blood into
that Scented Garden; it is my great hope that I shall live by it. It is
the crown of my life.”
Burton and some friends had previously published six
works of erotica, privately and in great secrecy. In a way, The Scented Garden was to be Burton's “coming out”, the first step of which had been The Nights and “The Terminal Essay.”
The day before he was to put the finishing touches
on his manuscript, Burton died, at the age of sixty-nine. Had he lived
only a few days longer, England and the world might have seen a
fighting polemic for homosexual freedom. But Burton's wife, a devout
Roman Catholic, burned the manuscript of The Scented Garden, and also destroyed the personal journals Burton had faithfully kept every day for over forty years.
Burton the infidel — a man who had loathed
Christianity — was given two Roman Catholic funerals by Isabel.
The second, held in London eight months after his death, was boycotted
by most of his friends, who were incensed by her disregard of
everything Burton, the rebel and pagan, had stood for. Swinburne wrote:
Priests and the soulless serfs of priests may swarm
With vulturous acclamation, loud in lies,
About his dust while yet his dust is warm
Who mocked as sunlight mocks their base blind eyes.
Their godless ghost of godhead, false and foul
As fear his dam or hell his throne: but we
Scarce hearing, heed no carrion church-kites howl:
The corpse be theirs to mock; the soul is free.
Sir Richard Burton was the foremost orientalist of
his age. He spoke twenty-five languages — with dialects included,
a total of forty. He learned classical Latin at the age of three, and
classical Greek at four. He was one of the greatest British explorers
of the Nineteenth Century. Burton was the author of more than fifty
books; his translation of the Arabian Nights is one of the treasures of the English language. He was also considered to be the foremost swordsman of his time.
Notes
1. Shelley's essay is included in Plato: The Banquet, translated by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Pagan Press 2001. To read descriptions and reviews of this book click here.
2. H. (Henry) W. Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, First Published April 1926. Corrections in 1930 and 1937. To read the entry on irony click here.
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