Note 37 — THE ESSENES.
Reading edition
“Perceiving, with more than ordinary acuteness and accuracy, what is alone, or at least above all other things, calculated to dissolve such connections, they repudiate marriage; and at the same time practice continence in an eminent degree. For no one of the Essenes marries a wife, because woman is a selfish and excessively jealous creature, and has great power to destroy the morals of man, and to mislead with continual tricks; for she is always devising flattering speeches and other kinds of hypocrisy as on a stage; bewitching the eyes and the ears; and when they are subjugated like things stultified, she proceeds to undermine the ruling intellect.37