Excerpt from Mary M. Anderson, Hidden Power: The Palace Eunuchs of Imperial China
Eunuchs, males who have been rendered sexually impotent by mutilation or removal of the external genitals,
served as palace menials, harem watch-dogs, and spies for rulers in most of the ancient world kingdoms
stretching from Rome, Greece, and North Africa, through the biblical lands, and on across the Asian continent.
Nor were castrati unknown in modern times. They were idolized in 18th-century opera houses of Europe,
having been emasculated as children to preserve their male soprano voices. The practice of using eunuchs for
Vatican choir, was banned only in 1878. Castrated aides attended the Great Mongol emperors of India, and the
maharajas of Indian princely states under British rule well into the twentieth century. Nowhere, however, were
eunuchs of such great and long-continuing historical significance as in the palaces of Imperial China.
Since remotest times, and especially after the advent of Confucianism, Chinese males demanded strict moral
purity in their women. Hordes of sexually impotent men were needed to guard the chastity of imperial ladies.
The presence of numerous ever-watchful eunuchs lurking in the recesses of the sprawling palace guaranteed
that each child born therein was sired by the monarch. Non-eunuch males, even relatives of the ruler, were
barred from the vicinity of the women's apartments on penalty of death.
Eunuchs were also required to preserve the aura of sacredness and secrecy that surrounded the Imperial
Presence . . . Only the "effeminate, cringing eunuchs," slavishly dependent upon the emperor for their very
lives, were considered cowed enough to be silent witnesses to his private foibles and weaknesses.
Much speculation exists as to why most monarchs of China so trusted their eunuchs. The belief was prevalent
that a castrato, since he would always be childless, would not covet political power and position to pass it to
sons, according to the Chinese tradition . . .
Many a prince became emperor while still a child. By the time he had reached his majority, his eunuchs had
introduced him to enervating extremes of promiscuity and other debilitating habits. Once corrupted morally and
physically, the new sovereign was a weak-willed tool in the hands of his caretakers--easily convinced that
enemies and traitors lurked everywhere. In this way, his faith in legitimate government advisors was destroyed.
His only recourse was to depend on his eunuchs for information, counsel, and support.
Often a young ruler found himself completely beholden to eunuchs who had usurped such power that they were
able to put him on the throne over a rival candidate. In such cases, the eunuchs were almost impossible to
dislodge from power, for they kept control in their own hands from one short reign to the next. In some
instances, the emperor actually feared his eunuch "benefactors."
The Need for Eunuchs, How They Were Castrated, and Their Lifestyle
. . . little has been said about the way in which Chinese males were castrated for palace service . . . Every fifth
year, each princely son was required to furnish the Manchu palace with eight young eunuchs who had been well
trained, inspected for proper castration, and declared free of disease or uncleanliness in person. The palace paid
the princes for purchasing and training each eunuch. Since this system did not nearly supply the numbers of
eunuchs required by the palace, grown men could voluntarily have themselves castrated, but to be accepted for
service at the palace, they had to find someone to vouch for their character, and they invariably ended up with
menial jobs that did not necessitate entrance into the imperial ladies' apartments. Large numbers of young boys,
purchased from their families, were castrated and drafted into the palace where they were especially favored by
harem ladies as pets and companions.
Just outside the Forbidden City gate, but within the Imperial City, was a run-down building where several
"knifers,"--who were recognized by the government as qualified to perform castrations, though they received no
government salary, plied their trade. Theirs was a hereditary, family profession. They collected six taels for
each surgery and nursing the eunuch through the initial stage of recovery.
When the surgery was about to take place, the candidate was placed on a low bed in a semi-reclining position,
and asked once more if he would ever regret being castrated. If the answer was no, one man clasped him about
the waist while two others separated his legs and held them firmly down to prevent any movement. Tight
bandages were wound around the thighs and lower abdomen, the patient was given a bowl of nerve-stunning"
herbal tea, and his private parts were desensitized with baths of hot pepper water. Both penis and testicles were
then swiftly cut off with a small curved knife as closely as possible to the body. A metal plug was immediately
inserted into the urethra, and the entire wound covered with water-soaked paper and carefully bandaged.
Immediately thereafter, the eunuch was made to walk about the room for two or three hours supported on each
side by the "knifers" before he was allowed to lie down. He was not allowed to drink any liquid for three days,
during which time he suffered great agony from thirst and extreme pain, and was unable to urinate. At the end
of three days, the bandages were removed, the inserted plug pulled out, and hopefully the sufferer was able to
obtain relief with a copious flow of urine, at which time he was congratulated and considered out of danger. If
the surgery rendered the eunuch unable to urinate, the passages having grown closed, he was doomed to an
agonizing death.
The severed parts, called the"precious," were preserved in a hermetically sealed vessel, and were highly valued
by the eunuch. They were always placed on a high shelf to symbolize that the owner should rise to high rank.
The eunuch also treasured his "precious" because, to be promoted to a higher grade, he was obliged to first
display his emasculated parts and be reexamined by the chief eunuch. If his "Precious" should be lost or stolen,
at promotion time he had to buy one from the eunuch clinic, or he could borrow or rent one from another
eunuch. It was also vital that the eunuch's organs be placed in his coffin at his death in the hope of
hoodwinking the gods of the underworld into believing that he was a complete man: otherwise he was doomed
to appeal in the next world as a she-mule.
http://www.usrf.org/news/010308-hiddenpower.html
Basho Matsuo (1644 ~ 1694)
Basho Matsuo is known as the first great poet in the history of haiku.
Spring departs.
Birds cry
Fishes' eyes are filled with tears
A autumn wind
More white
Than the rocks in the rocky mountain.
From all directions
Winds bring petals of cherry
Into the grebe lake.
Even a wild boar
With all other things
Blew in this storm.
Bush clover in blossom waves
Without spilling
A drop of dew.
From National Public Radio’s “Car Talk” web page.
Hilltop. Lake below.
My car sinks so slowly.
Thank god it's a rental.
Fifty-six T-bird
I took great pains to restore
Lost in the divorce
flaming wrinkled death
flies down the road in first gear
with her blinker on
Hill, curve, oh oh! Ice.
Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! Going too fast.
Snow bank saves my ass.
It reads YIELD, not STOP,
O Blind One, Maker of this
Thirty-car Backup.
“The Origin
of Capitalism” By Marvin Harris, Cannibals and Kings, pp. 251-267 [edited]
The appearance of the first states in northern Europe was [necessitated] to cope with the military threat of the
Mediterranean empires and to exploit the possibilities of trade and plunder provided by the great wealth of
Greece and Rome.
By 500 B.C. the social life of the peoples of Europe had become highly stratified. [They] were divided into
three hereditary castes: a warrior chief aristocracy, a priesthood, and commoners. At the apex of society was a
hereditary or semi-hereditary warrior king.
It certainly was not for want of suitable personalities that the northern European states failed to develop into
monolithic despotisms. In Piggott's words, they were a swaggering, belching, touchy, impossible crew--"hands
twitching to the sword hilt at the imagined hint of an insult...wiping the greasy moustaches that were a mark of
nobility."
Yet the Celtic kingdoms remained small and disjointed. Hence with the collapse of Rome in the fifth century
A.D., Europe did not lapse back into the "Dark Ages," never having gotten out of them in the first place. What
it lapsed back into was feudalism.
The new feudalism was more rigid and more formalized than its pre-Roman variety. . . [yet] the post-Roman
political organization of Europe continued to contrast with that of the [Eastern] empires. There was no way for
the more powerful kings to facilitate the production activities that took place in each separate little manorial
world.
Despite its reputation for being a 'dark age," the early medieval period was a time of population growth and of
expansion of agricultural production. It was only after A.D. 500 that iron axes and saws became cheap enough
to be used by the average farmer. The invention of the horseshoe increased the utility of the horse as a traction
animal. And the development of blacksmithing led to the introduction of a new kind of plow--a heavy irontipped instrument mounted on wheels and capable of cutting deep furrows in the wet clays and loams
characteristic of rainy, forested regions. Because the furrows were cut deep, cross-plowing was unnecessary
and the most economical field under cultivation became the one whose shape required the least number of
turnarounds per unit area, that is, a field longer than it was broad. This new shape facilitated an improved
method of crop rotation, which reduced the need for letting fields lie fallow. The whole system was admirably
suited to the relations of production characteristic of the manor. Each peasant family had access to the manor's
blacksmith facilities, heavy plow, teams of draft animals, and contiguous fields which a farmer could not have
afforded on an independent basis. Why, then, did this system not endure beyond the fourteenth century?
Explanations for the collapse of feudalism usually begin by noting that trade and manufacture increased, and
that the search for profits created supply and demand market relationship. What has to be explained, therefore,
is why it took over 500 years for the towns and markets to begin to subvert the feudal order.
The answer, I think, is that towns and markets grew slowly as long as the serfs and free peasants could maintain
a relatively high standard of living from their traditional agricultural activities. The development of commercial
life to the point where it threatened the feudal status quo had to wait for the build-up of population density. As
density rose, efficiency declined, and so did agricultural profitability from the point of view both of the peasants
and of the feudal lords. This encouraged the feudal lords to seek supplementary sources of income, the most
important of which was the raising of sheep for wool, which in turn restricted the amount of land available for
food crops, reduced the size of peasant holdings, pauperized much of the rural population, and stimulated
migrations to the towns and wool production centers.
The period immediately around the overloading and depletion of a pre-industrial ecosystem should be
characterized by peak rates of female infanticide. The data are available for late medieval England. According
to Josiah Russel, the junior age sex ratio rose to a peak of 130:100 between 1250 and 1358, and remained
drastically imbalanced for another century. Of course, since infanticide in the Judeo-Christian tradition was
considered murder, every effort was made by parents to make it seem as if the deaths of unwanted babies was
purely accidental. Barbara Kellum's study of infanticide in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century England suggests
that the coroner would be called in if a child was scalded to death by a pot of' water that tipped off a stove, or
was drowned in a pan of milk, or fell down a well. But suffocation, the most frequent cause of "accidental"
infant death, was handled by the parish priest.
Selective infanticide is the only explanation for the huge imbalance in the late medieval juvenile sex ratios.
Despite the high rate of female infanticide, the population of England continued to increase until 1348, when
the most devastating plague in the history of Europe--the Black Death--carried off between one-quarter and
one-half of the population. From what is known about the relationship between malnutrition and resistance to
disease, I think it is reasonable to suppose that a significant percentage of the mortality rate in the Black Death
pandemic was related to the deterioration of nutritional standards. Certainly, the shift in population from
countryside to towns and the increase in the overall density of settlements were causally related to the outbreak.
In the aftermath of the plague, Europe entered a period of intense political and economic unrest. The feudal
kingdoms were shaken from top to bottom by massive peasant uprisings, messianic movements, an outbreak of
cults that practiced self-flagellation, massacres of Jews, schisms within the Catholic Church, crusades to
suppress heretics, the founding of the Inquisition, and a ceaseless round of wars, one of which is known
appropriately enough as the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453). What all this adds up to, I suggest, is that the
intensification of the manorial mode of production had reached its ecological limits and that the crisis preceding
the emergence of the new mode of production which we call capitalism . . .
One question that remains is why the decline in population after the Black Death did not become part of a cycle
of demographic and economic ups and downs similar to the rise and fall of living standards that lay behind the
dynastic changes in hydraulic society. Why, in other words, was feudalism replaced by an entirely new system
instead of being restored when the crisis had passed?
In the crisis of European feudalism, the problem lay in the landlessness of the victims of enclosures and the
raising of animals on lands that were needed to raise food crops. The first order of business of the manorial
lords turned merchants and manufacturers could not be to drive out the sheep, restore the peasants to the land,
and stop manufacturing woolens. The maximization of their own immediate political and economic welfare lay
not in going backward but in going forward into larger and more uninhibited attempts to make money and
accumulate capital by raising more sheep and manufacturing more woolens. In short, the manorial system was
not restored; rather, it was replaced by a system based on scientific technology, machine production, capitalism,
and parliamentary democracy.
While the English, French, and Spanish monarchs were capable of brutal interventions in the lives of their
subjects, their tyranny was always limited by the opposition of big property owners and wealthy merchants.
"The rulers of European absolutism," says Wittfogel, "schemed as ruthlessly and killed as mercilessly as did
their Eastern confreres. However, their power to persecute and appropriate was limited by the landed nobles,
the Church, and the cities whose autonomy the autocratic overlords could restrict, but not destroy." When
Europe's kings claimed divine mandates and absolute authority, the bourgeoisie in France and England balked.
Would-be European Pkaraohs and Incas sooner or later resigned their rights to represent heaven or ended up
under the guillotine.
Italian Renaissance Art
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson by Camille Paglia
Though the homosexuality of Greek high culture has been perfectly obvious, the facts have been
suppressed or magnified, depending on period and point of view . . .
The Greek beautiful boys is one of the west's greatest sexual personae. The beautiful boy is an
androgyne, luminously masculine and feminine. He has male muscle structure but a dewy
girlishness
In Greece the beautiful boy was always beardless, frozen in time. At manhood, he became a lover of boys
himself. The Greek boy, like the Christian saint, was a martyr, victim of nature's tyranny. His
beauty could not last and so was caught full-flower by Apollonian sculpture. There are
hundreds of pots, shards, and graffiti hailing so-and-so kalos, "the beautiful," flirtatious public
praise of male genitalia, opposite to ours: a small thin penis was fashionable, a large penis
vulgar and animalistic. Even brawny Hercules was shown with a boy's genitals. Therefore,
despite its political patriarchy, Athens cannot be considered --horrid word-- a phallocracy. On
the contrary, the Greek penis was edited down from an exclamation point to a dash. The
beautiful boy was desired but not desiring. He occupied a pre-sexual or supra-sexual
dimension, the Greek aesthetic idea. In convention, his adult admirer could seek orgasm,
while he remained unaroused.
Cults of beauty have been persistently homosexual from antiquity to today's hair
salons and houses of couture. Professional beautification of woman by
homosexual men is a systematic reconceptualizing of the brute facts of female
nature. . . . Visionary idealism is a male art form. The lesbian aesthete does not
exist.
Italian Art: Renaissance Form
The artist is one of the great sexual personae of the Renaissance, a culture hero and worker of marvels.
Before this, sculptor and painter, as manual laborers, were always inferior to the poet. Everywhere except
Greece, they were simply artisans . . . The artist attacks by earth, air, water, and fire. He shapes his hero
out of clay and wax. He exerts superhuman energies, until he is struck down by fever. . .
. . . [A] homo-erotic glamorization of the beautiful boy, a Greco-Roman theme [was] revived in
the Renaissance.
. . . Donatello's bronze David, [is] the first beautiful nude and the first truly freestanding since
the fall of Rome. Blatantly homosexual in inspiration, it shows David standing victorious over
the severed head of Goliath, which he tramples underfoot. The story of David and Goliath would become
a political symbol of Florentine resistance to tyranny. Donatello's David is astonishingly young, even
younger than the Kritios Boy. David's contrapposto is languorously Hellenistic. The hand on hip and
cocked knee create an air of sexual solicitation. From the side, one is struck by the peachy buttocks, bony
shoulder blades and petulantly protruding boy-belly. The combination of child's physique with female body
language is perverse and pederastic. Michelangelo is to adopt this erotic formula for his more athletic
nudes, where it becomes overly sadomasochistic.
Donatello's David is "strangely androgynous," conscious only of his own sensuous beauty. David has long
feminine locks of hair, tangled with ribbons, and a splendidly raffish
wreathed hat, a
version of the traveler’s hat of Hermes
Psychopompos.
But here is no traveler’s cloak, only
exquisitely etched leather buskins. A
pornographic trope: the half-dressed is
more erotic than the totally nude. The
feathery wing of Goliath's helmet, like an
escaping thought, climbs ticklishly up the
inside of David's thigh, pointing towards
the genitals. Roman putti often display
their genitals or mischievously urinate, a
motif adopted for Renaissance fountains.
Donatello poeticizes the ostentatio
genitalium, a pagan showing. The hoary
head of a monster conqueredis a familiar
iconographic detail, but here it vomits a
wreathlike flood of blood ringing the
statue. The stream is the giant's and
the artist's, own desire. David,
bulging is massive sword to the center, has stolen the adult penis, as he
has stolen hearts. The gushing blood, wing-topped, is a carnal cloud,
Zeus as a maimed eagle bearing up Ganymede.
I think Donatello's David, even more than the ancient Venus Pudica, was
the true model for Boitticelli's Venus. David, fusing Venus and Mars,
skims into view on a swirl of the dreaming artist's fantasy, half spasmodic
release, half rising sigh. The David's shimmery, slithery bronze is a
frozen wet dream, an Apollonian petrifaction.
It is also a portrait of the artist, whose oppressed face appears like a signature at the bottom,
another homoerotic motif borrowed by Michelangelo. The armed boy bursts like Athena from
the artist's imprisoned brain.
The beautiful boy is homosexuality's greatest contribution to western culture. Un-Christian,
and anti-Christian, he is an iconic formalization of the relation between the eye and reality.
Repeated in a thousand forms in Italian painting and sculpture, he is the ultimate symbol of Renaissance
art . . . Donatello's David stands on its own because it has rejected northern Gothicism for southern
paganism. Its hardness and domination of space come from the artist's rediscovery of the authentically
western will, inflexible and amoral. Art has rearmed itself with the pagan glorification of matter.
The morally and sexually ambiguous smile of Donatello's David has a long and subsequent history. It
goes directly to Michelangelo's Victory after passing through Verrocchio to Leonardo, where it ends up on
the Mona Lisa. Finally, we see it on Bernini's androgynous angel impishly piercing St. Teresa . . . .
Ottoman Names and Titles
Bey: Ottoman provincial governor
Kadi: (same as 'adi) Islamic judge; member of the ulama
Darwish: a Sufi Pasha: Ottoman military commander (governor) of high rank
Devshirme: special Ottoman levy of non-muslim boys destined for the janissary corps and palace service
Sharia: Islamic law
Dhimmi: non-Muslim subject of a Muslim state
Sipahi: Ottoman "feudal" cavalry
Emir: commander (same as amir)
Timar: a type of military "fief" assigned to members of the Ottoman "feudal" cavalry in return for military
service
Janissaries: Ottoman elite infantry corps armed with gun powder weapons
Jizya: special head tax charged to non-Muslim subjects of Muslim state
Ulama: Muslim religious authorities; men versed in Muslim states the religious sciences and the law