Note 155 — THE TEN WAZIRS; OR THE HISTORY OF KING AZADBAKHT AND HIS SON.[130]

“Eunuch,” etymologically meaning chamberlain (εὐνὴ + ἔχειν), a bed-chamberservant or slave, was presently confined to castrated men found useful for special purposes, like gelded horses, hounds, and cockerels turned to capons. Some writers hold that the creation of the semivir or apocopus began as a punishment in Egypt and elsewhere; and so under the Romans amputation of the “peccant part” was frequent: others trace the Greek “invalid,” i.e., impotent man, to marital jealousy, and not a few to the wife who wished to use the sexless for hard work in the house without danger to the slave-girls. The origin of the mutilation is referred by Ammianus Marcellinus (lib. iv., chap. 17), and the Classics generally, to Semiramis, an “ancient queen” of decidedly doubtful epoch, who thus prevented the propagation of weaklings. But in Genesis (xxxvii. 36; xxxix. 1, margin) we find Potiphar termed a “Sarím” (castrato), an “attenuating circumstance” for Mrs. P. Herodotus (iii. chap. 48) tells us that Periander, tyrant of Corinth, sent three hundred Corcyrean boys to Alyattes for castration ἐπὶ ῇτ ἐκτομῇ, and that Panionios of Chios sold caponised lads for high prices, (viii. 105): he notices (viii. 104 and other places) that eunuchs “of the Sun, of Heaven, of the hand of God,” were looked upon as honourable men amongst the Persians whom Stephanus and Brissonius charge with having invented the name (Dabistan i. 171). Ctesias also declares that the Persian kings were under the influence of eunuchs. In the debauched ages of Rome the women found a new use for these effeminates, who had lost only the testes or testiculi = the witnesses (of generative force): it is noticed by Juvenal (i. 22; ii. 365–379; vi. 366.)

—sunt quos imbelles et mollia semper

Oscula delectant.

So Martial,

—vult futui Gallia, non parere,

And Mirabeau knew (see Kadísah) “qu’ils mordent les femmes et les liment avec une précieuse continuité.” (Compare my vol. ii. 90; v. 46). The men also used them as catamites (Horace i. Od. xxxvii.)

“Contaminato cum grege turpium

Morbo virorum.”

In religion the intestabilis or intestatus was held ill-omened, and not permitted to become a priest (Seneca Controv. ii. 4), a practice perpetuated in the various Christian churches. The manufacture was forbidden, to the satisfaction of Martial, by Domitian, whose edict Nero confirmed; and was restored by the Byzantine empire, which advanced eunuchs, like Eutropius and Narses, to the highest dignities of the realm. The cruel custom to the eternal disgrace of mediæval Christianity was revived in Rome for providing the choirs in the Sistine Chapel and elsewhere with boys’ voices. Isaiah mentions the custom (lvi. 3–6,). Mohammed, who notices in the Koran (xxiv. 31), “such men as attend women and have no need of women” i.e. “have no natural force,” expressly forbade (iv. 118), “changing Allah’s creatures,” referring, say the commentators, to superstitious ear-cropping of cattle, tattooing, teeth-sharpening, sodomy, tribadism, and slave-gelding. See also the “Hidáyah,” vol. iv. 121; and the famous divine Al-Siyúti, the last of his school, wrote a tractate Fi ’l-Tahrími Khidmati ’l-Khisyán = on the illegality of using eunuchs. Yet the Harem perpetuated the practice throughout Al-Islam and African jealousy made a gross abuse of it. To quote no other instance, the Sultan of Dár-For had a thousand eunuchs under a Malik or king, and all the chief offices of the empire, such as Ab (father) and Báb (door), were monopolised by these neutrals. The centre of supply was the Upper Nile, where the operation was found dangerous after the age of fifteen, and when badly performed only one in four survived. For this reason, during the last century the Coptic monks of Girgah and Zawy al-Dayr, near Assiout, engaged in this scandalous traffic, and declared that it was philanthropic to operate scientifically (Prof. Panuri and many others). Eunuchs are now made in the Sudán, Nubia, Abyssinia, Kordofán, and Dár-For, especially the Messalmiyah district: one of those towns was called “Tawáshah” (eunuchry) from the traffic there conducted by Fukahá or religious teachers. Many are supplied by the district between Majarah (Majarash?) and the port Masawwah; there are also depôts at Mbadr, near Tajurrah-harbour, where Yusuf Bey, Governor in 1880, caponised some forty boys, including the brother of a hostile African chief: here also the well-known Abu Bakr was scandalously active. It is calculated that not less than eight thousand of these unfortunates are annually exported to Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey. Article IV. of the Anglo-Egyptian Convention punishes the offence with death, and no one would object to hanging the murderer under whose mutilating razor a boy dies. Yet this, like most of our modern “improvements” in Egypt, is a mere brutum fulmen. The crime is committed under our very eyes, but we will not see it.

The Romans numbered three kinds of eunuchs:—1. Castrati, clean-shaved, from Gr. κέστρος. 2. Spadones, from σπάω when the testicles are torn out, not from “Spada,” a town of Persia; and, 3. Thlibii, from θλίβω, to press, squeeze, when the testicles are bruised, &c. In the East also, as I have stated (v. 46), eunuchs are of three kinds:—I. Sandali, or the clean-shaved, the classical apocopus. The parts are swept off by a single cut of a razor, a tube (tin or wooden) is set in the urethra, the wound is cauterised with boiling oil, and the patient is planted in a fresh dunghill. His diet is milk; and and if under puberty, he often survives. This is the eunuque aqueduc, who must pass his water through a tube. 2. The eunuch whose penis is removed: he retains all the power of copulation and procreation without the wherewithal; and this, since the discovery of caoutchouc, has often been supplied. 3. The eunuch, or classical Thlibias and Semivir, who has been rendered sexless by removing the testicles (as the priests of Cybele were castrated with a stone knife), or by bruising (the Greek Thlásias), twisting, searing, or bandaging them. A more humane process has lately been introduced: a horsehair is tied round the neck of the scrotum and tightened by slow degrees till the circulation of the part stops and the bag drops off without pain. This has been adopted in sundry Indian regiments of Irregular Cavalry, and it succeeded admirably: the animals rarely required a day’s rest. The practice was known to the ancients. See notes on Kadísah in Mirabeau. The Eunuchata virgo was invented by the Lydians, according to their historian Xanthus. Zachias (Quæst. medico-legal.) declares that the process was one of infibulation or simple sewing up the vulva; but modern experience has suggested an operation like the “spaying” of bitches, or mutilation of the womb, in modern euphuism “baby-house.” Dr. Robert (“Journey from Delhi to Bombay, Müller’s Archiv. 1843”) speaks of a eunuch’d woman who after ovariotomy had no breasts, no pubes, no rotundities, and no desires. The Australians practise exsection of the ovaries systematically to make women barren. Miklucho Maclay learned from the traveller Retsch that about Lake Parapitshurie men’s urethras were split, and the girls were spayed: the latter showing two scars in the groin. They have flat bosoms, but feminine forms, and are slightly bearded; they mix with the men, whom they satisfy mechanically, but without enjoyment (?). MacGillivray, of the “Rattlesnake,” saw near Cape York a woman with these scars: she was a surdo-mute, and had probably been spayed to prevent increase. The old Scandinavians, from Norway to Iceland, systematically gelded “sturdy vagrants,” in order that they might not beget bastards. The Hottentots before marriage used to cut off the left testicle, meaning by such semi-castration to prevent the begetting of twins. This curious custom, mentioned by the Jesuit Tochard, Boeving, and Kolbe, is now apparently obsolete—at least, the traveller Fritsch did not find it.