J. Richard Gott on Life, the Universe, and Everything
Princeton astrophysicist J. Richard Gott is known among cosmologists as much for his time travel theory that explains the birth of the universe as he is for his turquoise jacket, which he wears at all his time travel presentations. Gott jokes that it's the Coat of the Future, but he's serious about the beginning of time.
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Jill Neimark for Science & Spirit: The more we discover about how the universe works, the weirder it gets! Your book brought home that time and space are not the terra firma we assume. Just before his death, Albert Einstein said: “The distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” So why do we experience time as an arrow moving relentlessly forward?
J. Richard Gott: Nobody can explain why time seems to us like watching a movie. Why is it that movie can’t be rewound—even though it’s allowed under the laws of electromagnetism and gravity? Certainly in the subatomic world, particles called positrons look like they might actually be electrons traveling backward in time. But in the macro world we live in, if you drop a vase and it breaks into many pieces, the fragments of the vase aren’t likely to leap together and reassemble themselves. Our perception of time feels concrete and objective to us.
S&S: Is time travel really possible? Travel in either direction would have enormous implications for life and for our species.
JRG: We’ve already seen time travel to the future, although in a very tiny way. One of Einstein’s great insights was that moving objects age more slowly than stationary ones. Certain subatomic particles, called muons, decay much more slowly in cosmic ray showers, where they’re moving with great speed.
But we, too, can time travel. Cosmo-naut Sergei Avdeyev, who orbited the Earth for 748 days in three space flights, is about one-fiftieth of a second younger than he would have been had he stayed home. In other words, he has time-traveled about one-fiftieth of a second into the future. It’s not much, but with faster rockets, it could be more. So the question is, how much money do we want to spend on this endeavor?
It would be very expensive. I do think in the twenty-first century, we’ll explore time travel to the future, but only in short hops.
Want to find out more? Visit the Science & Spirit Exploring the Connections page for this story.
S&S: You said time travel helps us understand how the universe operates and might even show how the universe gave birth to itself. Your book illustrates the relativity of time and space with the image of an astronaut zooming through the universe at eighty percent of the speed of light. He has a clock in his spaceship, and a mirror at the top and bottom of his ship, with a light beam bouncing between them.
If you put a time loop at the beginning of theuniverse, it would be like having one branch of a tree circle around and grow up to be thetrunk. In that way, the universe could be its own mother.
The clock ticks every time light hits a mirror. I’m on Earth watching him, with the same type of clock, with mirrors the same distance apart. We each think we’re living in normal space-time. But if either one of us looks at the other, things get weird. I’m certain his clock is ticking more slowly. For every five years I age here on Earth, he only ages three. What’s going on?
JRG: That light clock is one that Einstein imagined, as a way of showing there is no universal time. First you have to understand that light always travels at the same speed through empty space.
S&S: That alone is strange, isn’t it?
JRG: Very. If you move toward or away from a lightwave it passes you at a constant speed of 300,000 kilometers per second. No matter how fast the astronaut is going, light passes him at the same speed it would if he were on Earth. That’s why he doesn’t think anything unusual is happening.
But when I look at the astronaut’s clock as he’s flying by, I don’t see what he sees. The speed at which he’s moving, relative to me on Earth, changes things. The light beam in his spaceship looks like it’s moving diagonally because he’s flying so fast that by the time that beam goes from the bottom mirror to the top mirror, the top mirror has moved, and so the light has to travel further.
In his view of space-time, everything is consistent and the light is bouncing straight up and down. In my view of space-time, everything is consistent, but the light is bouncing diagonally and taking longer to do so. When we look at each other, we realize that for each of us, time and space are relative. Time travel to the future is made possible by the fact that observers who are moving relative to one another have different ideas of time.
S&S: The concepts sound simple, but the implications are boggling. In the world of relativity, space and time are one big block that already exists. It sounds like a mystical experience: being one with everything, no time, no space.
So what about traveling backward in time? Might someone travel backward and save a loved one from dying?
JRG: Einstein’s theory of curved space and time says it’s possible, but the fact is, this presents us all kinds of paradoxes. If you could go back and kill your young grandmother, then you wouldn’t have been born, and so you couldn’t go back to kill your grandmother. Can the past be changed? If it can’t, is there such a thing as free will? Such paradoxes can be resolved by either the conservative view—that time travelers don’t change the past but were always part of it—or by the more radical many-worlds picture of quantum mechanics—that time travelers can cause new parallel universes to branch off. Finally, if time travel to the past is possible, why aren’t time travelers from the future already showing up on the White House lawn? The answer: They can’t travel to a time before time machines were built. You can’t use a time machine until it exists.
So, maybe in the year we finally build a time machine, they’ll all start showing up from the future. Paradoxes aside, if you could go faster than the speed of light, you could theoretically go back in time, but that seems impossible.
S&S: So how might we go backward in time?
JRG: According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, space-time can curve and you might take a shortcut, beating a light beam to its destination, allowing you to travel back into the past. One way we could theoretically do it is to use cosmic strings. Cosmic strings are predicted to be very thin strands of high-density material left over from the early universe. Think of them like spaghetti that is infinitely long or curled up in closed loops. But that spaghetti has so much mass—about 10 million billion tons per centimeter—that it bends and warps space-time. I found a solution where you can actually travel around two moving cosmic strings, and get back in time to greet yourself at the spaceport before you leave. It reminds me of M.C. Escher’s drawingAscending and Descending, where monks keep climbing a staircase around a monastery and always find themselves right back where they started. Something even more intriguing came from a work that I published with Li-Xin Li. If you put a time loop at the beginning of the universe, it would be like having one branch of a tree circle around and grow up to be the trunk. In that way, the universe could be its own mother.
Otherwise we have to wonder how something came out of nothing. And how does nothing know the laws of physics? Maybe the universe wasn’t made out of nothing. Maybe it was made out of something, and that something was itself. How could it possibly do that? Through time travel, through a time loop. It even produces a natural explanation for the arrow of time as one moves away from the time loop at the beginning. Einstein’s relativity allows this, but we’ll probably need to have a workable theory of quantum gravity to see whether it’s possible. Time travel impinges on all the deep questions.
Escher, as usual, has a wonderful image, Drawing Hands, to express this. It’s of two hands, with each drawing the other. The idea of the universe as its own mother may be troubling, but maybe the universe should trouble us.
S&S: That idea might trouble theologians. If the universe could create itself, where does God come into the picture?
JRG: Whose picture is it? It’s Escher’s picture. The analogy is that Escher is God. If it weren’t for Escher, there wouldn’t be this picture.
Of course, when we were working on this solution, we had no thoughts about religion or theology. We just solved the equations. But if I take off my scientist’s hat and talk like a regular person, I’ve got to cope like everyone else with religious questions.
I’m a Presbyterian. I believe in God; I always thought that was the humble position to take. I like what Einstein said: “God is subtle but not malicious.” I think if you want to know how the universe started, that’s a legitimate question for physics. But if you want to know why it’s here, then you may have to know—to borrow Stephen Hawking’s phrase—the mind of God.
S&S: If you had one hour to travel in time, in either direction, what would you do and where would you go?
JRG: I’d go forward about 200,000 years to see if we’d survived that long and, if so, what people were up to. Of course, I might have some trouble communicating with humans in the future, because I wouldn’t expect to find anyone speaking English.
S&S: Why 200,000 years?
JRG: Because that’s how long homo sapiens have been around. I’ve done some thinking about time not just in terms of travel or physics, but in relation to how long things last—things like the Berlin Wall or Broadway plays or the human species. In 1993, I published a paper inNature that applied one of the most famous postulates in science, the Copernican principle, to time.
The Copernican principle is simply the idea that your location in the universe is not special. Most likely your last name falls somewhere in the middle ninety-five percent of the phone book, not right at the beginning or the end, which would be special. And most likely you’re living sometime in the middle ninety-five percent of the length of the human species. Otherwise you’d be in a special position and that’s just less likely.
Using some simple math, I predicted with ninety-five percent confidence that the human race would last at least another 5,100 years, but less than 7.8 million years. Now, that’s a wide range, but an important one. The fate of our own species is supremely important to us. Some people predict we’ll die out in the next hundred years if we aren’t careful; others think we’ll just last indefinitely. Neither is likely. In any case, we’d better not be complacent. The Earth is littered with the bones of extinct species.
S&S: The question would be, is our intelligence special and can it help us last longer? If we’re mammals like all the other mammals, then we don’t have any special chance. But maybe our intelligence is novel and puts us in a different category.
JRG: My estimates of the future longevity of the human species are based entirely on our past longevity as an intelligent species—the only one we know—and make no assumptions that our fate will be similar to that for other species. However, my estimates give us a total longevity (past plus future) quite comparable to that observed for other mammal species, whose average longevity is 2 million years.
Why the coincidence? Well, if we remain confined to Earth, we are subject to the things that routinely cause other mammal species to go extinct. That’s why I am so concerned about the space program. So far, the space program is very brief, and the Copernican principle predicts it will probably go out of business sooner rather than later. And clearly we would increase our chances of surviving if we colonize space.
S&S: In other words, now that we understand that in terms of longevity we’re not special, we had better do something special, and soon.
JRG: Yes. In the short period we’ve been around, we’ve done some remarkable things. We’ve figured out a great deal about the laws of physics and the universe. But the ability to ask questions doesn’t seem to give us any more time. Don’t waste your time, humanity; you have just a little. That is the report from the future.
J. Richard Gott on Life, the Universe, and Everything
6:16 PM | BY ZeroDivide
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Retrospective diagnoses of autism
7:06 PM | BY ZeroDivide
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A retrospective diagnosis is the practice of identifying a condition in a historical figure using modern knowledge, methods and medical classifications.[1][2]
Autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) were first identified by Hans Asperger and Leo Kanner in 1943, and it was not until many years later that they were formally recognised by the medical community. Journalists, academics and autism professionals have speculated that certain famous or notable historical people had autism or other autism spectrum disorders such asAsperger syndrome. Such speculations are often disputed. For example, several autism researchers speculate that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was autistic or otherwise neurodivergent, while other researchers say there is not sufficient evidence to draw such conclusions.[3][4] Temple Grandin, a professor who is herself autistic, speculates that very early inventions like the stone spear were probably the work of autistic cavemen.[5][6]
Contents
[hide]Validity of retrospective diagnoses[edit]
Further information: Michael Fitzgerald (psychiatrist)
Michael Fitzgerald of the Department of Child Psychiatry at Trinity College, Dublin has written numerous books and articles on the subject, identifying over 30 individuals as possibly having AS.[7][8][9][10] Ioan James is a British mathematician who, in 2005, published Asperger's Syndrome And High Achievement: Some Very Remarkable People, identifying a number of historic figures as autism candidates.[11]
Speculation of this sort is, by necessity, based on reported behavior and anecdotal evidence rather than any clinical observation of the individual. Psychologist and author Oliver Sacks wrote that many of these claims seem "very thin at best",[12] and Fred Volkmar, of the Yale Child Study Center, has remarked that "there is unfortunately a sort of cottage industry of finding that everyone has Asperger's".[13] Michael Fitzgerald's research, in particular, has been heavily criticised, and described by some as "fudged pseudoscience"[14] and "frankly absurd".[15]
List of individuals[edit]
See also: List of people on the autistic spectrum
| Person | Speculator |
|---|---|
| Hugh Blair of Borgue – 18th century Scottish landowner thought mentally incompetent, now studied as case history of autism. | Rab Houston and Uta Frith[16] Wolff calls the evidence "convincing".[17] |
| Prince John of the United Kingdom – 20th century British prince famous for his epilepsy and isolation. He exhibited repetitive behavior and is often believed to be autistic and intellectually disabled. | K. D. Reynolds[18] and Paul Tizley[19] |
| Stanley Kubrick – filmmaker | Michael Fitzgerald and Viktoria Lyons see it as "convincing" stating that he was well known to have obsessive traits and found it socially difficult with his collaborators on set.[7][20] |
| Henry Cavendish – 18th century British scientist. He was unusually reclusive, literal minded, had trouble relating to people, had trouble adapting to people, difficulties looking straight at people, drawn to patterns, etc. | Oliver Sacks,[12] and Ioan James;[4][11] Fred Volkmar of Yale Study Child Center is skeptical.[13] |
| Charles XII of Sweden – speculated to have had Asperger syndrome | Swedish researchers, Gillberg[21] and Lagerkvist[22] |
| Jeffrey Dahmer – serial killer | Silva, et al.[23] |
| Anne Claudine d'Arpajon, comtesse de Noailles – French governess, lady of honor, tutor | Society for French Historical Studies, New York Times[9] |
| Emily Dickinson – poet | Vernon Smith[9] |
| Paul Dirac – quantum physicist | Graham Farmelo, biographer[24] |
| Glenn Gould – Canadian pianist and noted Bach interpreter. He liked routine to the point he used the same seat until it was worn through. He also disliked social functions to the point that in later life he relied on the telephone or letters for virtually all communication. He had an aversion to being touched, had a different sense of hot or cold than most, and would rock back and forth while playing music. He is speculated to have had Asperger syndrome. | Michael Fitzgerald,[7] Ioan James,[11] Tony Attwood,[25] Peter Ostwald[26] |
| Adolf Hitler – Austrian born, Nazi German politician, chancellor and dictator | Michael Fitzgerald[9] and Andreas Fries;[27]although others disagree and say that there is not sufficient evidence to indicate any diagnoses for Hitler.[14] |
| Thomas Jefferson – President of the United States and author of the Declaration of Independence | Norm Ledgin,[28] Tony Attwood,[25] and Ioan James[11] |
| James Joyce – author of Ulysses | Michael Fitzgerald and Antionette Walker;[8]this theory has been called "a somewhat odd hypothesis".[29] |
| Bohuslav Martinů – Czech-American composer (1890 -1959) | F. James Rybka[30] |
| William McGonagall - poet, notoriously bad yet he never understood that others mocked him | Norman Watson[31] |
| Michelangelo – Italian Renaissance artist, based on his inability to form long-term attachments and certain other characteristics | Arshad and Fitzgerald;[7][32] Ioan James also discussed Michelangelo's autistic traits.[11] |
| Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – composer | Tony Attwood[25] and Michael Fitzgerald;[7]others disagree that there is sufficient evidence to indicate any diagnoses for Mozart.[3] |
| Charles Richter – seismologist, creator of the eponymous scale of earthquake magnitude | Susan Hough in her biography of Richter[33] |
| William James Sidis | Michael Fitzgerald [34] |
| Alan Turing – pioneer of computer sciences. He seemed to be a math savant and his lifestyle has many autism traits about it. | Tony Attwood[25] and Ioan James[11] |
| Michael Ventris – English architect who deciphered Linear B | Simon Baron-Cohen[35] |
| Blind Tom Wiggins – autistic savant | Oliver Sacks[36] |
| Ludwig Wittgenstein – Austrian philosopher | Michael Fitzgerald[37] Tony Attwood,[25] and Ioan James;[11] Oliver Sacks seems to disagree.[12] |
Specific individuals[edit]
Isaac Newton (1643–1727), Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) and Albert Einstein (1879–1955) all died before Asperger syndrome became known, but Ioan James,[4] Michael Fitzgerald,[7] and Simon Baron-Cohen[38] believe their personalities are consistent with those of people with Asperger syndrome. Tony Attwood has also named Einstein as a likely case of mild autism.[25]
Not everyone agrees with these analyses. According to Oliver Sacks, the evidence that any one of these figures had autism "seems very thin at best".[12] Glen Elliott, a psychiatrist at the University of California at San Francisco, is unconvinced that either Newton or Einstein had Asperger syndrome, particularly due to the unreliability of diagnoses based on biographical information. Elliot stated that there are a variety of causes that could explain the behaviour in question, and points out that Einstein is known to have had a good sense of humour, a trait that, according to Elliot, is "virtually unknown in people with severe Asperger syndrome".[38]
Isaac Newton[edit]
Isaac Newton hardly spoke and had few friends. He was often so absorbed in his work that he forgot to eat, demonstrating an obsessive single-mindedness that is commonly associated with Asperger's. If nobody attended his lessons, he reportedly gave lectures to an empty room. When he was 50, he suffered a nervous breakdown brought on by depression and paranoia.[38] After Newton's death, however, his body was found to contain massive amounts of mercury, probably from his alchemical pursuits, which could have accounted for his eccentricity in later life.[39]
Nikola Tesla[edit]
In Nikola Tesla's autobiography, My Inventions, he claims to have the ability to "visualize with the greatest facility", allowing him to fully design and test his inventions in his mind:
Tesla also displayed other suggestive behaviours.[41]
Albert Einstein[edit]
Albert Einstein is sometimes thought to have had Asperger syndrome, despite forming close relationships with a number of people, marrying twice, and being outspoken on pro-social political issues. According to Baron-Cohen, "passion, falling in love and standing up for justice are all perfectly compatible with Asperger syndrome",[38] although he notes that Einstein's delayed language development and educational slowness may be more indicative of high-functioning autism.[11]
Fitzgerald describes Einstein's interest in physics as "an addiction", and says that it was important for him to be in control of his life. He also points to Einstein's occasionally perceived lack of tact, social empathy, and naivety, as further apparent traits he had in common with people with autism spectrum disorders.[10] Ioan James adds that Einstein was much better at processing visual information than verbal; Einstein himself once said "I rarely think in words at all".[11]
In her 1995 book In a World of His Own: A Storybook About Albert Einstein, author Illana Katz notes that Einstein "was a loner, solitary, suffered from major tantrums, had no friends and didn't like being in crowds", and conjectures that he may have had some form of autism.[4
Thesis: Eunuchs are Gay Men
5:23 PM | BY ZeroDivide
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Thesis: Eunuchs are Gay Men
(with a listing of secondary sources)
by Mark Brustman
One day I read in the Bible that Jesus said there were eunuchs who were born so from their mother's womb.1 To my knowledge, a eunuch was a man who had been castrated, so how could he be born that way? As a translator by profession, I was aware that ideas are sometimes distorted in translation, and that this was particularly a problem in the Bible. In this case, the context was about men's obligation to marry, and these and other kinds of eunuchs were said to be exempt. As a proud gay man and, at that time, a Christian, I was intrigued by this. Since I firmly believed (and still do) that I was born gay and that, on this basis, it would be a bad idea for me to marry a woman, it occurred to me that a so-called born eunuch might mean a gay man like myself.2
The common denominator in gay men and castrated men, which could be the basis for categorizing both groups under the term eunuch, is that neither one is suitable for marriage. This indeed was the point of the gospel verse. But in order to prove beyond a doubt that born eunuchs were gay men, I had to prove that, like gay men:
(1) born eunuchs could have complete genitals,
(2) they had no lust for women, and
(3) they had lust for men.
There is little agreement nowadays about what causes sexual orientation and what it consists of. Some say it is a matter of genetics, others that it is caused by psychological influences in early childhood. Still others say that it is fluid and changeable over the course of a person's life. To my mind, the best way to accommodate all of these ideas within one system is to say that most people are born bisexual, but a few are not. Most of the born bisexuals learn to avoid homosexual interaction. Europeans and Americans are raised to suppress homosexual erotic impulses, and direct their sexual attention exclusively to the opposite sex, so their so-called straight orientation is a result of environmental factors, which can change over time. Some resist the indoctrination and express both sides of their sexual nature freely -- these are what our society calls bisexuals. But a small percentage of people genetically just don't have the capacity to feel attraction to the opposite sex. These are the people who say they were born gay. I am one of them. By the same token, just as few people lack the capacity to feel attraction to their own sex. In this culture, these people simply blend in with the majority.(2) they had no lust for women, and
(3) they had lust for men.
A bisexual in my terminology is anyone who genetically is able to feel lust for men and women. This describes the majority of people. What we call a "straight person" is, in most cases, a bisexual who has been conditioned to avoid acting on his or her homosexual side. Gay people are monosexuals who are genetically unable to feel lust for their respective opposite sex. A few straights are monosexual like gays, in that they are genetically unable to feel lust for people of their own sex. I believe this inability has something to do with some people lacking sexual pheromone receptors for one sex or the other. The argument I am making in this essay is that men who were genetically unable to feel lust for women, i.e. what we call gay men today, were called eunuchs by our pre-Christian ancestors.
Almost all current dictionaries define a eunuch as a man missing a crucial part of his reproductive anatomy, either due to castration or birth defect. But I will show in Section 1 of this essay that most so-called "eunuchs" in the ancient world were not anatomically deprived and were able to procreate. Moreover in Section 2, I show that one of the central defining characteristics of a eunuch in the ancient world was his lack of a sexual drive for women, something which is not true of castrated men. Men who lust after women will continue to do so even if they are genitally mutilated. Castration may prevent a straight man from impregnating a woman, but it will not change his desires. In Section 3, I show that eunuchs were stereotyped as lustful sex objects for men.
When I began my research back in 1991, I set out to define the category Jesus had called the "born eunuch," which was something different from a castrated man, or "man-made eunuch."
The oldest available version of Matthew is a translation probably from Aramaic or Hebrew into Greek,3 and the word used in the Greek translation is eunouchos, from which we get our word eunuch. Most scholars state that the word eunouchos comes from eune (bed) and echein (to have), and claim that it means "one who guards the bed." [Note in 2015: I have recently become convinced that the real etymology of eunouchos is not from eune, but rather from eunous ("good-minded") and echein, and is a contraction of a Greek expression meaning "to be good in mind; to be loyal, good-natured."] But Jesus would not have used the Greek word, since he spoke Aramaic. The Hebrew and Aramaic word for eunuch is saris, an Assyrian loan word that has been interpreted to mean "at the head."4 None of these etymologies ruled out my hypothesis that born eunuchs were, in general, anatomically whole like gay men. Later I learned that an ancient Syriac translation of the Bible used the word mu'omin for eunouchos andsaris. Mu'omin means "person of faith" or "person of trust."
I began a search lasting several years to find proof, either that a born eunuch was born missing some male reproductive parts, or that he simply lacked desire for women. The field of evidence I had to search through consisted of dozens, even hundreds, of ancient texts in which eunuchs were mentioned. By analyzing what each author or text said about an individual eunuch or about the category of eunuchs, I could put all the texts together and observe the common trends in the way ancient authors defined eunuchs.
An ancient Roman novel I had read in college, Petronius's Satyricon, raised an initial theoretical problem for my thesis, however. The Satyricon is a comic novel about two men lusting after a teenage boy. Most people today, at least in Europe and America, would identify them as gay men because of their homosexual lifestyle, but none of the main characters called themselves eunuchs. In fact, there are scads of homosexually active men throughout Greek and Roman literature who are not called eunuchs. This can be explained in two ways.
First, homosexual behavior, though disapproved of particularly for the passive partner, was tolerated a lot more in ancient Greece and Rome than it has been in modern Europe and the United States. Significant numbers of Greek and Roman men appear to have been actively bisexual: having sex with other men, but also fulfilling their marriage duties. I hear that is still the custom today in those countries. So it is possible and even likely that many younger Roman men, without actually being born gay, avoided the responsibilities of marriage by pursuing a wholly homosexual lifestyle. This would certainly fit the carefree character of the protagonists in the Satyricon. Nothing prevents bisexuals from getting married, though, so they would not be eunuchs.
On the other hand, unless you wanted a job as a domestic servant for women or at the imperial court, being known as a eunuch in Rome entailed no special advantage. On the contrary, eunuchs were ridiculed in ancient Greece and Rome like gays are today. Xenophon, the Greek historian of the fifth century BCE, wrote: "There is not a man in the world who would not think he had the right to overreach a eunuch." So even if a man was a born eunuch (and the first-person narrator of the Satyricon does betray some anxiety about his own ability to perform with women), he might very well not want to carry that label.
The first place I looked for evidence about born eunuchs was a religious reference work called the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. The article on the wordeunouchos by Johannes Schneider stated that the Greek word appeared in two chapters in the New Testament, and the Hebrew word saris occurred 40 times in the Old Testament5 (which latter figure I later discovered was an underestimate). Moreover, Schneider asserted that many men were called saris in the Old Testament who were not actually eunuchs, by which he meant to say they were not castrated. Schneider also mentioned a discussion in the Talmud concerning differences between born versus man-made eunuchs.6 Of course, this was just the kind of source text I was looking for: ancient scholars arguing over what a born eunuch was. I will present and analyze the evidence that I found below, but for now I am merely retracing my steps in my research.
From Schneider I learned of an article published in Germany just before World War I, concerning the attitudes of the early church fathers to eunuchs, and their interpretations of Matthew 19:12.7 On the "eunuch" shelf at the library, I found a recent German book on eunuchs in classical Greece and Rome which provided a list of names of eunuchs. That book cited another German article concerning the word eunouchos and related terms in secular Greek and Latin sources.8 This article referred me to a still another German article on eunuchs, with extensive references to ancient sources, in a nineteenth-century encyclopedia of classical Greek and Roman historical figures and literature.9 I compiled a list of over 500 classical references to eunuchs from these German secondary sources, and I determined to look up as many as I could get hold of.
Thank goodness, German is my second language. I could never have gotten off the ground with this project if I did not know German. Whatever else you might say about Germany, it has produced some thorough and conscientious scholars. I am grateful that some of them chose to direct their attention to eunuchs. Thank goodness, too, that I took Greek and Latin in college, and that my alma mater is U.C. Berkeley, which has one of the world's greatest libraries and grants borrowing privileges to its alumni.
I collected references to eunuchs in the Bible using Young's Analytical Concordance to the Bible, finding forty-five rather than forty Old Testament verses containing the word saris,10 in addition to the two New Testament chapters referring to eunuchs.11 Later I also found eight apocryphal verses using the word eunouchos.12 I had to learn a little Hebrew to look up the Old Testament references.
None of the Bible verses indicated that eunuchs were castrated. And a verse about castration, Deuteronomy 23:1, said nothing about eunuchs. What's more, looking in the concordance, I discovered something very strange. The King James Version translates saris variously as chamberlain, eunuch, officer, or as a proper name Rabsaris (literally "chief eunuch"). As a translator, I was appalled at the inconsistency, which to me smacked of a cover-up of some kind. I checked Martin Luther, who translated the German Bible. He was more consistent in his mistranslation, using Kämmerer or Erzkämmerer (chamberlain or head chamberlain) in every single case except Isaiah 56:3-5 and Matthew 19:12. In Matthew, Martin Luther translates the born eunuch category as "es sind etliche verschnitten, die sind aus Mutterleibe also geboren" or in English, "there are some cut (!) who are born so from their mother's womb." Ouch!
Schneider's article offered an explanation, albeit somewhat implausible, for the inconsistency in translation. He said that the term saris had a dual meaning, with the other being "palace official." Apparently, sarisim had participated in religious rites (Jeremiah 34:19), which would be impossible if they were castrated. Deuteronomy 23:1 says castrated men cannot enter the congregation of the Lord. Therefore, modern religious scholars, assuming all eunuchs were castrated, concluded that a saris must not necessarily be a eunuch. But Isaiah 56:3-5 and Matthew 19:12 clearly imply that the procreative ability of a saris is compromised somehow. It sounds unlikely to me that a term that implies one is not fully male would also be used to cover ordinary men, especially when there were other perfectly good words for palace officials. I see no reason why those sarisim participating in religious rites could not be uncastrated, born eunuchs.
From Greece, Rome, and the Bible, I expanded my search for eunuchs to other ancient cultures and spiritual traditions, and some of my most helpful resources were the following.
A friend of mine who studies ancient Egypt turned me on to a book about the Egyptian mythical figure Seth,13 which provided several references to articles about homosexuality and eunuchs in ancient Egypt.
Bernadette Brooten's Love Between Women provided references to ancient astrologists who wrote about eunuchs and other homosexuals.14
David Greenberg's The Construction of Homosexuality referred to a French-language article on homosexuality in an encyclopedia about the Sumero-Babylonian and Assyrian cultures.15 That and another article from the same encyclopedia, on eunuchs,16 provided important references. Greenberg's book, an exhaustive cross-cultural history of homosexuality, also contained references to eunuchs and third-gender roles in traditional African communities which paralleled the understanding of eunuchs in ancient Middle Eastern cultures.17 [Since composing this website, I found a great new book on Africa edited by Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe, Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies in African Homosexualities, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998.]
In addition, while studying circumcision rituals (which I have come to believe are derived from a primeval association between holiness and a diminished capacity for sexual pleasure), I came across an anthropological report of a spiritual role reserved for unmanly men among the Mbo people of Zaire.
[Also since first posting this website, I was introduced to the work of Malidoma and Sobonfu Somé, a married couple who both come from the town of Dano in Burkina Faso and write about Dagara rituals and spirituality for a broad audience. Sobonfu Somé's book The Spirit of Intimacy: Ancient Teachings in the Ways of Relationships contains a chapter on "Homosexuality: The Gatekeepers," in which she writes, "Gatekeepers are people who live a life at the edge between two worlds -- the world of the village and the world of the spirit."]
Murray and Roscoe's Islamic Homosexualities and Shaun Marmon's Eunuchs and Sacred Boundaries in Islamic Society, as well as the Encyclopedia of Islam, provided references to eunuchs in Islam.
Zia Jaffrey's recent study of eunuchs currently living in India,18 and a psychological study called The Life Style of the Eunuchs,19 provided insight into the lives of contemporary Indian eunuchs as well as references to traditional Indian sources.
An early twentieth-century book by Richard Millant, entitled Les Eunuques à travers les Ages or "eunuchs across the ages," gave some juicy anecdotes, but not enough references to primary sources. Like most modern scholars, Millant was operating from an assumption that being a eunuch meant being castrated. Without being able to check his sources for myself, I could not challenge his interpretations. Eventually, though, I found many of Millant's sources through the German articles and other secondary sources.
Taisuke Mitamura's Chinese Eunuchs: The Structure of Intimate Politics was also stingy with footnotes, and anyway I could not check its references for lack of translations of the original sources into European languages. Mitamura did mention a nineteenth-century article on Chinese eunuchs by a European named G. Carter Stent ("Chinese Eunuchs," in Journal of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, New Series No. 11, Shanghai, 1877, pp. 143-184), who, like Millant, provides lots of interesting references, but also assumes that eunuchs are defined by castration.
From these works, I have gathered several hundred ancient references to eunuchs, and over the course of seven years, I have assiduously looked up the primary sources in order to determine whether eunuchs, or born eunuchs, met my three definitive criteria for gay men. I checked primary sources in their original languages whenever my language skills permitted, that is in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and to some extent Egyptian and Akkadian. For ancient Indian sources, I relied on translations,20 but they supported my findings in Middle Eastern and Western sources.
Most of the references neither proved nor disproved my hypothesis. The pre-Christian ancient writers were never specific in defining a eunuch as lacking a penis and/or testicles. Many of them made vague allusions to an imperfection, lack of power, femininity, or impotence, which did not exclude either genital deformity or a gay man's kind of impotence with women. A lot of them merely mentioned that a particular person was a eunuch, period. Although I was sometimes discouraged during the first few years because of not finding definitive proof that eunuchs and gay men shared the same characteristics, the very fact that hundreds of references did not exclude my hypothesis was cumulatively encouraging. With the overwhelming number of sources failing to specify that eunuchs were castrated, it seemed that I only needed to find one eunuch with a full set of genitals to throw the burden of proof off of my hypothesis and onto the opposite view.
The evidence I eventually found was tailor-made to prove my hypothesis. Eunuchs as a category were able to procreate (except "if someone is a eunuch in such a way that he lacks a necessary part of his body"), and they had a sexual aversion to women and an attraction to men. Moreover, the early Indo-European cultures attacked them with the same kind of negative stereotypes that are inflicted on gay men today. But even more interesting was the reverence and appreciation enjoyed by eunuchs in many non-Indo-European ancient cultures, for which eunuchs/homosexuals assumed priestly roles.
In the following I will bring the citations that were most relevant to proving my thesis. First, I will present quotes from ancient works indicating -- and even stating categorically -- that eunuchs could procreate. Then I will present quotes to the effect that eunuchs avoided sexual interaction with women or were impotent with them. This abstinence with respect to women was actually what defined the eunuch in the ancient mind, so the category covered not only gay men but any man who was unable or unwilling to have sex with women. Thirdly, lest the religious homophobes try to insist eunuchs are simply impotents and sexual abstainers, I also bring quotes demonstrating that eunuchs were known for sexually pursuing and accommodating other men. Thus eunuchs are gay men, and gay men are eunuchs.
Think about it. Jesus spoke specifically about gay men in Matthew 19:12. He even said people might become eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. He did not anywhere say eunuchs should avoid their own kind of sexual expression. The church's condemnation of gay sexuality thus falls into the same category as its former hatred of straight sexuality, namely the category of irrelevance. In fact, you could even call it complicity in genocide, given the number of gay people who have been tortured and killed, either by the church or with its condonation.
A lot of the ancient authors and works mentioned on this website are unfamiliar even to well-educated people who are not specialists in religious history, the Greek and Roman classics, and ancient multicultural literature. I would like for this research to be meaningful to a broad spectrum of people, and for that to be possible, it has to be easy for people of all walks of life to follow. The argument I am making is dividing into three sections. As stated above, the first section includes quotes that show their authors felt eunuchs could procreate. The second section contains quotes showing that their authors felt eunuchs were impotent with or sexually turned off to women. The third section includes quotes from authors attesting to the frequent sexual interaction between eunuchs and other men.
What I intend to prove with these quotes is that people living thousands of years ago all across Europe and Asia acknowledged a certain category of men as different from the norm; that their difference consisted in the fact that they had no sex drive toward women, while they did enjoy sex with other men; and that their difference was conceived of as natural and inborn. I will bring also evidence that some cultures recognized that there were women who by nature had no lust for men. In sum, I intend to prove that gay men and women existed in the ancient world as categories distinguished from the norm.
I welcome any questions that readers may have. You can direct them to my email address at <aquarius@well.com>.
Please read on!
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