Introductory material

Influence of the development of the brain upon the sexual impulse — Relations between speech and love — The psychic-emotional roots of love — Love as a product of civilization — Relation between the physical and the spiritual poietic impulse — The “function-impulse” of Dr. Santlus — Psychical sexual equivalents — Schopenhauer, Hirth, and Mantagazza, on this subject — Rôle of sexuality in the feelings of life — The organic necessity of love — Sexual philosophy — The Marquis de Sade — Otto Weininger — Max Zeiss — Relations of love to the individual feelings of personality — The reproductive impulse and the conjugative impulse — Love and love’s embrace as a personal aim.

The psychogenetic fundamental law of love — The way of the spirit in love — Its tendency from the general to the individual — From the remote to the proximate — Love as a transcendental and as a personal relationship.

The association of religio-metaphysical ideas with the sexual life — A general anthropological phenomenon — Anthropomorphistic-animistic explanation of the relation between religion and the sexual life — Billroth’s scientific analysis of religious perception — L. Feuerback, M’Lennan, and Tylor on this subject — My own description of the psychological processes in the association between the religious and the sexual life — The deification of love according to E. von Mayer — Strongest in women — Vicarious religions and sexual perceptions — History of religio-sexual phenomena — Religious prostitution — Single and repeated acts of religious prostitution — Sexual self-surrender to the deity or his representative — Defloration by divine symbols — Defloration deities among the Indians, the Jews, and the Romans — Religious defloration by representatives of the deity — The Babylonian Mylitta-cult — Diffusion and explanation thereof — Religious prostitution in India — Among primitive peoples — Bachofen’s brilliant explanation of religious prostitution as a counteraction to the individualization of love — Contempt for virginity among primitive peoples — Permanent religious prostitution — Sexual intercourse as a consecrated act — The temple-girls of the Greeks, Phœnicians, and Indians — The Indian “nautch-girls” — The sense of eternity in the religious and the sexual impulse — Sexual mysticism — Religio-erotic festivals — Their wide diffusion — Examples from antiquity, from India, and from Central and South America — Sexual mysticism in Christianity — Religio-sexual sects — The “unio mystica” — The primiz, or mystical marriage — Mariolatry — A religious poem.

Asceticism — Its origin — Metchnikoffs explanation of the origin of asceticism — Disharmonies of the sexual life — Psychology of ascetics — Their hypersexuality — Great antiquity and ubiquity of asceticism — The asceticism of the Indians, Mohammedans, and Christians — Preoccupation of Christian ascetics with sexual matters — Sexual visions — Dissolute sects — Monastic and cloistral life — Modern asceticism — Its difference from ancient asceticism — Its connexion with actual experiences — Example of Schopenhauer — Hitherto unpublished evidence of the relationship between his ascetic views and his own life — Tolstoi on the sorrows of voluptuousness — His relative asceticism — Weininger’s renewal of early Christian asceticism — Its cause — Characteristics of Weininger’s book.

The belief in witchcraft — The principal source of all misogyny and contempt of women — Not a Christian discovery — Primeval association between sexuality and magic — The sexual origin of the belief in witchcraft — Devil’s mistresses — The predisponents of the medieval belief in witchcraft — Continuance of this belief into our own times — Rôle of sexuality in pastoral medicine — External and internal causation of the theological treatment of sexual problems — Sexual casuistic literature — The religious factor in the sexual life of the present day — Sexual excesses of modern sects — The revival of romanticism — Experiences of an elderly physician regarding religion and sexuality — Deprivation of love and satiety of love as sources of religious needs — Significance of the religious factor in the history of love — Subordinate rôle of this in the individualization of the sentiment of love.