the excesses of devout enthusiasm the ascetic
performs exactly the same acts as are performed in these excesses
of erotic enthusiasm. To mix excreta with the food, to lick up
excrement, to suck festering sores--all these and the like are
acts which holy and venerated women have performed.

Not only the saint, but also the prophet and medicine-man have
been frequently eaters of human excrement; it is only necessary
to refer to the instance of the prophet Ezekiel, who declared
that he was commanded to bake his bread with human dung, and to
the practices of medicine-men at Torres Straits, in whose
training the eating of human excrement takes a recognized part.
(Deities, notably Baal-Phegor, were sometimes supposed to eat
excrement, so that it was natural that their messengers and
representatives among men should do so. As regards Baal-Phegor,
see Dulaure, _Des Divinites Generatrices_, Chapter IV, and J.G.
Bourke, _Scatalogic Rites of All Nations_, p. 241. See also
Ezekiel, Chapter IV, v. 12, and _Reports Anthropological
Expedition to Torres Straits_, vol. v, p. 321.)

It must be added, however, that while the masochist is overcome
by sexual rapture, so that he sees nothing disgusting in his act,
the medicine-man and the ascetic are not so invariably overcome
by religious rapture, and several ascetic writers have referred
to the horror and disgust they experienced, at all events at
first, in accomplishing such acts, while the medicine-men when
novices sometimes find the ordeal too severe and have to abandon
their career. Brenier de Montmorand, while remarking, not without
some exaggeration, that "the Christian ascetics are almost all
eaters of excrement" ("Ascetisme et Mysticisme," _Revue
Philosophique_, March, 1904, p. 245), quotes the testimonies of
Marguerite-Marie and Madame Guyon as to the extreme repugnance
which they had to overcome. They were impelled by a merely
intellectual symbolism of self-mortification rather than by the
profoundly felt emotional symbolism which moves the masochist.

Coprophagic acts, whether under the influences of religious
exaltation or of sexual rapture, inevitably excite our disgust.
We regard them as almost insane, fortified in that belief by the
undoubted fact that coprophagia is not uncommon among the insane.
It may, therefore, be proper