Intermediate Types Among Primitive Folk - A Study in Social Evolution

INTERMEDIATE TYPES AMONG PRIMITIVE FOLK

A Study in Social Evolution

BY

EDWARD CARPENTER

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Contents

Edward Carpenter

Intermediate Types among Primitive Folk, a Study in Social Evolution

Introduction

PART I. The Intermediate in the Service of Religion

CHAPTER I. As Prophet or Priest

CHAPTER II. As Wizard or Witch

CHAPTER III. As Inventors of the Arts and Crafts

CHAPTER IV. Hermaphrodism among Gods and Mortals

PART II. The Intermediate as Warrior

CHAPTER V. Military Comradeship among the Dorian Greeks

CHAPTER VI. The Dorian Comradeship in Relation to the Status of Woman

CHAPTER VII. Relation to Civic Life and Religion

CHAPTER VIII. The Samurai of Japan: and their Ideal

Conclusion.

Edward Carpenter

Edward Carpenter was born on 29 August 1844, in Hove, Sussex, England. He is best known as a socialist poet and philosopher, and an early gay activist.

Carpenter was educated at the nearby Brighton College, where his father was a governor, and received his university education at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. It was during his time at university that Carpenter began exploring his feelings for men. He developed a close friendship with Edward Anthony Beck, which, according to Carpenter had ‘a touch of romance’. When Beck eventually broke off communications, Carpenter suffered great emotional heartache; the overall sense of rejection mirrored his general unease with his sexuality as a whole.

Carpenter graduated from Cambridge, tenth in his class, in 1868, and thereafter joined the Church of England as a curate. In the following years, Carpenter experienced an increasing sense of dissatisfaction with what he saw as the hypocrisy of Victorian society and as a consequence, resolved to work for the benefit of the working classes. Carpenter left the church in 1874 and became a lecturer in astronomy at the University of Leeds as part of University Extension Movement – a movement formed by academics in order to introduce higher education to deprived areas of England. He hoped to lecture to the working classes, but found his lectures were mostly attended by middling sorts, many of whom showed little interest in the subject. After this failure, Carpenter moved to Sheffield and became increasingly radical, joining the Social Democratic Federation in 1883. Whilst living in the city, he wrote a piece in the Sheffield Independent, criticising the poor living and health-care conditions which the inhabitants were subjected to. During this period he also wrote England Arise!; a rousing socialist marching song.

Whilst still in Sheffield, Carpenter was gifted a pair of sandals from a friend in India, and ‘soon found the joy of wearing them’ as he later reported. He began making them himself, and this was the first successful introduction of sandals to Britain.

In 1890, Carpenter travelled to Ceylon and India to spend time with the Hindu teacher, Gnani, who he described in his work Adam’s Peak to Elephanta. The experience had a profound effect on his social and political thought. Carpenter began to believe that Socialism should not only concern itself with man’s outward economic conditions, but also affect a profound change in human consciousness. This form of ‘mystical socialism’ inspired Carpenter to begin a number of campaigns against air pollution and the promotion of vegetarianism. On his return from India in 1891, Carpenter met George Merrill, a working class man from Sheffield, with whom he formed a romantic relationship. The couple moved in together in 1898, and remained partners for the rest of their lives; an extraordinary feat given the rife hysteria generated by the Oscar Wilde trial of 1895. Their partnership, in many ways, reflected Carpenter’s cherished conviction that same-sex love had the power to subvert class boundaries. He wrote about this in The Intermediate Sex (1908), claiming that ‘Eros is a great leveller.’ This text was soon followed by Carpenter’s even more radical work Love’s Coming-of-Age, in which he gave a clear analysis of the ways in which sex and gender were used to oppress women; regarding marriage both as enforced celibacy and a form of prostitution. Carpenter remained politically active his entire life, and his left-wing pacifism led him to become a vocal opponent of the Second Boer War and then World War One. In 1919, he published The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife, where he argued passionately that the source of war and discontent in western society was class-monopoly and social inequality. Nine years later, in May 1928, Carpenter suffered a paralytic stroke and died on 28 June 1929. He had entreated in writing, for a statement to be read at his funeral, however the request was not discovered until several days after the burial. The words are now engraved on Carpenter’s tombstone; reflecting his life and all he worked towards; ‘Do not think too much of the dead husk of your friend, or mourn too much over it, but send your thoughts out towards the real soul or self which has escaped — to reach it. For so, surely you will cast a light of gladness upon his onward journey, and contribute your part towards the building of that kingdom of love which links our earth to heaven.’

Intermediate Types among Primitive Folk, a Study in Social Evolution

In this ground-breaking study of homosexuality, Edward Carpenter reviews an extensive body of literature, including accounts of Shamans and Bedarches (transgenders) in tribal society, and same-sex unions in ancient Greece and feudal Japan. This book includes much that has a direct bearing on issues of gay spirituality, including a discussion of the Kedushim, the priests of the ancient Near Eastern Goddess religion, and target of the Levitical anti-sodomy and anti-cross-dressing regulations. There is also a mention of the sanctioned Christian male same-sex unions in the Balkans, which gives a new dimension to recent controversies. The chapter on same-sex unions in feudal Japan is also of particular interest, as it deals with a topic very rarely dealt with by western writers.

Note

THE four chapters forming Part I of this book were originally published in Professor Stanley Hall’s American Journal of Religious Psychology for July, 1911; and in the Revue d’ Ethnographie et de Sociologie of the same date, issued by the International Ethnographic Institute of Paris.

With regard to the Dorian institutions in Part II, I owe much to Professor E. Bethe’s learned and authoritative treatise on that subject in the Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, Frankfurt-a-M., 1907.

E. C.

Introduction

THAT between the normal man and the normal woman there exist a great number of intermediate types—types, for instance, in which the body may be perfectly feminine, while the mind and feelings are decidedly masculine, or vice versâ—is a thing which only a few years ago was very little understood. But to-day—thanks to the labours of a number of scientific men—the existence of the-se types is generally recognised and admitted; it is known that the variations in question, whether affecting the body or the mind, are practically always congenital; and that similar variations have existed in considerable abundance in all ages and among all races of the world. Since the Christian era these intermediate types have been much persecuted in some periods and places, while in others they have been mildly tolerated; but that they might possibly fulfil a positive and useful function of any kind in society is an idea which seems hardly if ever to have been seriously considered. Such an idea, however, must have been familiar in pre-Christian times and among the early civilisations, and if not consciously analysed or generalised in philosophical form, it none the less underran the working customs and life of many, if not most primitive tribes—in such a way that the intermediate people and their corresponding sex-relationships played a distinct part in the life of the tribe or nation, and were openly acknowledged and recognised as part of the general polity.

It is probably too early at present to formulate any elaborate theory as to the various workings of this element in the growth of society. It might be easy to enter into a tirade against sex-inversion in general and to point out and insist on all the evils which may actually or possibly flow from it. But this would not be the method either of commonsense or of science; and if one is to understand any widespread human tendency it is obvious that the procedure has to be different from this. One has to enquire first what advantages (if any) may have flowed, or been reported to flow, from the tendency, what place it may possibly have occupied in social life, and what (if any) were its healthy, rather than its unhealthy, manifestations. Investigating thus in this case, we are surprised to find how often-according to the views of these early peoples themselves-inversion in some form was regarded as a necessary part of social life, and the Uranian man accorded a certain meed of honour.

it would seem-as a first generalisation on this unexplored subject—that there have been two main directions in which the intermediate types have penetrated into the framework of normal society, and made themselves useful if not indispensable. And the two directions have been in some sense opposite, the one being towards service in Warfare and the other towards the service of Religion. It would seem that where the homosexual tendency was of the robuster and more manly sort, leading men to form comrade alliances with each other in the direction of active and practical life, this tendency was soon reinforced and taken advantage of by the military spirit. Military comradeship grew into an institution, and the peoples who adopted it became extraordinarily successful in warfare, and overcoming other tribes spread their customs among them. Such was the case with the Dorian Greeks, whose comradeship institutions form the subjects of chapters v., vi., and vii. of this book; and such also appears to have been the case in a somewhat different way with the Samurai of Japan (chapter viii.) in the twelfth and succeeding centuries; and in lesser degree with many Mohammedan. peoples in Arabia, Persia, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. On the other hand, it would seem that where the homosexual tendency was of a more effeminate and passive sort, it led to a distaste, on the part of those individuals or groups who were affected by it, for the ordinary masculine occupations and business of the world, and to an inclination to retire into the precincts of the Temples and the services (often sexual) of Religion—which, of course in