y cruel, repulsive, and monstrous in an extreme degree,
that it is necessarily rare, and those who are afflicted by it are often
more or less imbecile. With whipping it is otherwise. Whipping has always
been a recognized religious penance; it is still regarded as a beneficial
and harmless method of chastisement; there is nothing necessarily cruel,
repulsive, or monstrous in the idea or the reality of whipping, and it is
perfectly easy and natural for an interest in the subject to arise in an
innocent and even normal child, and thus to furnish a germ around which,
temporarily at all events, sexual ideas may crystallize. For these reasons
the connection between love and pain may be more clearly brought out in
connection with whipping than with blood.

There is, by no means, any necessary connection between flagellation and
the sexual emotions. If there were, this form of penance would not have
been so long approved or at all events tolerated by the Church.[107]

As a matter of fact, indeed, it was not always approved or even tolerated.
Pope Adrian IV in the eighth century forbade priests to beat their
penitents, and at the time of the epidemic of flagellation in the
thirteenth century, which was highly approved by many holy men, the abuses
were yet so frequent that Clement VI issued a bull against these
processions. All such papal prohibitions remained without effect. The
association of religious flagellation with perverted sexual motives is
shown by its condemnation in later ages by the Inquisition, which was
accustomed to prosecute the priests who, in prescribing flagellation as a
penance, exerted it personally, or caused it to be inflicted on the
stripped penitent in his presence, or made a woman penitent discipline
him, such offences being regarded as forms of "solicitation."[108] There
seems even to be some reason to suppose that the religious flagellation
mania which was so prevalent in the later Middle Ages, when processions of
penitents, male and female, eagerly flogged themselves and each other, may
have had something to do with the discovery of erotic flagellation,[109]
which, at all events in Europe, seems scarcely to have been known before
the sixteenth century. It must, in any case, have assisted to create a
predisposition. The introduction of flagellation as a definitely
recognized sexual stimulant is by Eulenburg, in his interesting book,
_Sadismus und Masochismus_, attributed to the Arabian physicians. It w