like men in
disguise, and in some respects possess powers which make them superior to
men. This is recognized in those plays, festivals, and religious dances,
so common among primitive peoples, in which animal disguises are worn.[44]
When men admire and emulate the qualities of animals and are proud to
believe that they descend from them, it is not surprising that they should
sometimes see nothing derogatory in sexual intercourse with them.[45]

A significant relic of primitive conceptions in this matter may perhaps be
found in the religious rites connected with the sacred goat of Mendes
described by Herodotus. After telling how the Mendesians reverence the
goat, especially the he-goat, out of their veneration for Pan, whom they
represent as a goat ("the real motive which they assign for this custom I
do not choose to relate"), he adds: "It happened in this country, and
within my remembrance, and was indeed universally notorious, that a goat
had indecent and public communication with a woman."[46] The meaning of
the passage evidently is that in the ordinary intercourse of women with
the sacred goat, connection was only simulated or incomplete on account of
the natural indifference of the goat to the human female, but that in rare
cases the goat proved sexually excitable with the woman and capable of
connection.[47] The goat has always been a kind of sacred emblem of lust.
In the middle ages it became associated with the Devil as one of the
favorite forms he assumed. It is significant of a primitively religious
sexual association between men and animals, that witches constantly
confessed, or were made to confess, that they had had intercourse with the
Devil in the shape of an animal, very frequently a dog. The figures of
human beings and animals in conjunction carved on temples in India, also
seem to indicate the religious significance which this phenomenon
sometimes presents. There is, indeed, no need to go beyond Europe even in
her moments of highest culture to find a religious sanction for sexual
union between human beings, or gods in human shape, and animals. The
legends of Io and the bull, of Leda and the swan, are among the most
familiar in Greek mythology, and in a later pictorial form they constitute
some of the most cherished works of the painters of the Renaissance.

As regards the prevalence of occasional sexual intercourse between men or
women and animals among primitive peoples at the present time, it is
po