ABSTRACT
Castration has been extensively practised by stockfarmers, and this has kept a knowledge of the practice alive among western races, to which the castration of men has become unfamiliar. Those, indeed, who took part in the retreat of the German and Turkish army from Syria during 1918 learned that the Arabs made a practice of castrating their defeated enemies. The gentler-minded among the conquerors contented themselves with pedication. In both cases the aim was to humiliate the vanquished by emasculation, actual or symbolic. Since the days when Herodotus visited Asia Minor, moral outlooks in that part of the world have remained unchanged in this matter. But, until quite recently, we none of us realised how extensive a part the idea of castration 1 continues to play in the minds of civilised human beings—not in their conscious thoughts, but in the darkness of the unconscious, where elemental savagery persists.
