nities of the pubescent state, erotomania and religious
mania are the most frequent and the most pronounced. Sometimes they go
hand in hand, the most inordinate sensuality being coupled with abnormal
religious zeal. A young woman of my acquaintance, whose conduct has
given rise to much scandal, is, at times, a reincarnate Messalina, while
at other times she is the very embodiment of ethical and religious
purity. Another young girl, in whom _vita sexualis_ was about to be
established, became religiously insane and had delusions in which she
declared that she was in heaven and sitting at the right hand of God.
She declared this over and over again, while shamelessly committing
manustrupation! Krafft-Ebing calls attention to this relation between
religious and sexual feeling in psycho-pathological states. "It
suffices," says he, "to recall how intense sensuality makes itself
manifest in the clinical history of many religious maniacs; the motley
mixture of religious and sexual delusions that is so frequently observed
in psychoses (_e. g._, in maniacal women who think they are or will be
the mother of God), but particularly in masturbatic insanity; and
finally, the sexual, cruel self-punishment, injuries, self-castrations,
and even self-crucifixions, resulting from abnormal religio-sexual
feeling."[93]

[93] Krafft-Ebing, _Psychopathia Sexualis_, p. 8.

An example of the last mentioned self-immolation (self-crucifixion) is
given by Berghierri, and is a remarkable instance of the
interchangeableness of religious emotion and sexual desire in
psychopathic individuals. The man in question, who had been intensely
sensual, manufactured a cross, nailed himself to it, and ingeniously
managed to suspend himself and cross from the window of his sleeping
apartment.

"All through the history of insanity the student has occasion to observe
this close alliance of sexual and religious ideas; an alliance which may
be partly accounted for because of the prominence which sexual themes
have in most creeds, as illustrated in ancient times by the phallus
worship of the Egyptians, the ceremonies of the Friga cultus of the
Saxons, the frequent and detailed reference to sexual topics in the
Koran and several other books of the kind, and which is further
illustrated in the performances which, to come down to a modern period,
characterize the religious revival and camp-meeting as they tinctured
their medieval model, the Muenster Anabaptist mo