4 SCIENTIFIC-HUMANITARIAN COMMITTEE dem (Different from the 0thers)wasmade Committee sought a modus vivendi with in 1919 and shown in almost the whole of the new regime, as did many others who before it was banned by a revived hoped that by adopting a nationalist line censorship. It was the first use of the cin- they could placate the National Socialists. ema to promote the cause of homosexual However, the accession to full power by liberation, and a second film called Gesetze Hitler and his supporters meant the end of der Liebe was produced in 1927. Under the the Committee and the destruction of the Weimar Republic the committee carried Institute for Sexual Science which on extensive propaganda, but by now or- Hirschfeld had founded in 1918. ganizations of a primarily or purely social Conclusion. Little known except character far exceeded the committee in in homosexual circles, the Scientific- membership. The postwar era saw an ex- Humanitarian Committee was all but tensive gay subculture thrive in Berlin and forgotten by the end of World War 11, but other large German cities. its publications survived in a few learned The growing anti-Semitic move- libraries and private collections. The ment in Germany made Hirschfeld one of homophile movement that began in the its targets. He was assaulted in in 1950sperhaps unjustly neglected this brave 1920 and again in 1921, the second time and pioneering effort to change the preju- receiving a fractured skull and being pre- dice and intolerance of Western society in maturely reported dead. On the other hand, regard to homosexuality, and future stu- the Social Democrats and Communists dents of the subject are well advised to supported the Committee's demands in consider how it conceived its mission and the Reichstag, and in 1929, a 15-13 vote of set about fulfilling it. Small as it was, it a committee approved the striking of the was the forerunner of the vast interna- "homosexual paragraph" from the draft tional gay rights movement of today. penal code. However, this victory was premature: no action was taken by the BIBLIOGRAPHY. JohnLauritsen and David Thorstad, The Early Homosexual Reichstag, and the mounting economic Rights Movement (1864-1 935), New crisis not only made other issues more York: Times Change Press, 1974; James urgent, but led to the phenomenal rise of D. Steakley, The Homosexual Emancipa- the National Socialist German Workers tion Movement in Germany, New York: Party [Nazis), which despite the presence Arno Press, 1975. Warren Johansson of some homosexuals in its own ranks denounced the homosexual liberation movement, in part because it was identi- SCULPTURE fied with such Jewish figures as Hirschfeld See Art, Visual; Nude in Art. and Kurt Hiller, who had participated in a coalition of groups seeking reform of vari- ous sex laws in Germany and edited its critique of the official draft of the new Scythia is the general name given code. by ancient authors to the whole area ex- After the Vienna Congress of the tending from the Danube to the frontiers World League for Sexual Reform on a Sci- of China. It was occupied by a warlike, entific Basis (1930)) Hirschfeld did not nomadic people who came from what is return to Germany, fearing for his life at now southern Russia in the first the hands of the Nazis. His collaborators millennium B.C. Before the ninth century continued the work of the committee, but B.C. they formed a kingdom in the eastern the growthof the extreme right doomed its , and in the seventh century they efforts. With the appointment of Hitler as invaded Syria, Mesopotamia, and the Bal- Reichschancellor on January 30, 1933 the kan peninsula. Though attacked by Darius SCYTHIANS 9

I of Persia (512 B.c.) and then by Alexander chichte der Lustseuche im Altertume the Great (ca. 325 B.c.), they survived but (Historyof the Plague of Lust in Antiquity; were driven back to southern Russia, where 1839))argued that the "feminine disease" in the following centuries they were dis- meant a proclivity to pederasty. In 1882 placed by the related . Russian the Russian historian Vsevolod Miller and Ukrainian scholars of today regard the opened a new chapter in the discussion by Scythian culture, known from extensive pointing to survivals of Scythian myth archeological finds that supplement the and custom among the Ossetians. Subse- scattered references in classical literature, quently, Georges DumCzil analyzed an as part of the prehistory of their country. Ossetian legcnd in which the hero Hamyc What links the Scythians with offends the god of the sea Don Bettyr and homosexuality is the long debate over the is punished by having to endure pregnancy meaning of a Greek passage in Herodotus' and childbirth. He concluded that Hero- Histories which, brief as it is, seems to dotus had confounded two phenomena, a provide evidence for a sexual culture that genuine Scythian tradition from the was widespread in antiquity, though un- northern coast of theBlack Sea and a piece known among the Greeks themselves. of folk belief associated with the shrine Herodotus (I, 105)reports the dire conse- at Ascalon. This city on the eastern shore quences of the fact that some stragglers of the Mediterranean remained pagan from the Scythian army violated the temple (Canaanite) even after the interior of of Aphrodite Urania at Ascalon, on the Palestine had been conquered by the in- coast of Palestine. "On such of the Scythi- vading Israelites, who because they had ans as plundered the temple at Ascalon, no navy could not blockade the port and and on their posterity for succeeding gen- compel its surrender. erations, the goddess inflicted the theleia The two elements in this tangle nusos (/'feminine disease"). And the Scy thi- of legends deserve closer analysis. The ans say themselves it is for this cause they Scythian element is thevarietyof sharnan- suffer the sickness, and moreover that any ism with symbolic change of sex, includ- who visit the Scythian country may see ing the wearing of women's clothing, a amongthem what is the condition of those custom associated with the practice of whom the Scythians call enarees." Else- divination among the peoples of the far where [IV, 67) Herodotus credits the north of the Eurasian continent and one enarees-he translates the term as an- that reputedly serves to enhance the drogynoi, "men-women1'-with a special magical powcrs of the shaman. In modern method of divination which they have times the practice of gender change was from Aphrodite. The Hippocratic work studied among the Chukchees of eastern On Airs, Waters and Places, 22, ascribes Siberia by the anthropologist Waldemar the "disease" of the anarieis, understood Bogoras, who emphasized that no physical as a form of impotence, to divine retribu- hermaphroditism was involved, but rather tion, which struck the wealthy in parti- the adoption in full of the clothing, speech, cular. Finally, Aristotle in the Nicomach- manners and even marital status of a ean Ethics (W, 7) speaks of a malakia, woman. These customs are believed to be "effeminacyn-also defined as to thely, remnants of a once-vast Eurasian cultural "the feminineM-that was a hereditary trait realm, which may well have embraced the of the Scythian kings. Such is the scanty Scythians. but significant evidence that survives Turning to the Canaanite element from antiquity. identified with Ascalon, this would lie in Julius Rosenbaum, in an omnium the indigenous religion of the country, gatherum of texts and comments on the more specifically in the practices forbid- sexual life of the ancients entitled Ges- den in Deuteronomy 22:5 and 23:18. The 4 SCYTHIANS latter form part of the profession of the the religion of the Scythians),Arkhwl- kSdesh and the kelebh, who donned ogicheskir sbornik Gosudarstvennogo Ermitazha, 2 (1961),85-87; S. S. women's clothing and prostituted them- Bessonova, Religioznye predstavleniia selves to male worshippers at the temples skifov (The Religious Conceptions of the of Ishtar/Astarte, of which the oldest, as Scythians), Kiev: Naukova dumka, 1983, Herodotus specifically mentions, was the pp. 5659; Georges Dumbzil, Romans de one at Ascalon. The rendering of the word Scythie et d'alentour, Paris: Payot, 1978; W. R. Halliday, "A Note on the thelea krTdGsh in the Septuagint by pomeuon and nousos of the Skythians," Annuol of the teliskomenos, which are glossed in the British School at Athens, 17 (191&11), lexica by terms indicating that these servi- 95-102; Karl Meuli, "Scythica. 2. tors of Ishtar performed both erotic and Enarees. Scharnanentum venvandter priestly functions for the devotees of the Volker," Hermes, 70 (1935),127-37. goddess, suggests that the hierodules of Warren Iohansson the Canaanite-Phoenician religion were the counterpart of the shamans in the SEAFARING archaic cultures of sub-Arctic Eurasia. This As a closed environment usually conclusion reinforces what is known from inYolving only one gender, maritime life other sources: the kZdEshim ewaged in offers conditions favoring situa- as part Of their reli- tional homoerotic behavior. Nonetheless, gious which provoked the at the present stage of research, documen- and hatred of the priests and Levites in tation remains incomplete. Historical ancient Israel. Hence the Greek observers evidence, which comes mainly from west- of Palestinian and Eurasian sacrosexual ern civilization, is generally of two types: customs were struck the on the one hand, the official of the between them. maritime authorities, and their enforce- Soviet commentators On the pas- ment; on the other, folklore and oral tradi- sages in Herodotus and the Hippocratic tion,most commonly sailor songs or sea corpus have preferred to stress the pur- shanties. ported survival of matriarchal customs: In addition to shipboard sexual- the male who practiced divination had to ity, there is a long and reasonably adopt the gender Of a in Order to attested history of sexual interaction be- exercise a function that had previously tween seafaring men in port and homo- Only to it is sexuals attracted by a Usexual more consistent with the Of attributed to sailors at large. As ethnographicdata on divination and magic a result, seamen and their images have to see in the Scythian institution (and its assumed aroleinthegay subcultureout of Canaanite another instance Of all proportion to their miniscule presence the peculiar gift for extrasensolypercep- as permanent members of that subculture. tion that is often linked with inversion of Naval Policy and Discipline. gender role and . The Although Greco-Roman culture was suf- religious culture of the Scythians institu- fused with same-sex relations, little has tionalized this phenomenon in theguise of been recorded of this activity in a mari- a shamanism which survived among the time context, because it was remote Ossetians taken for ganted. In a foufih-century text recent times, when the mounting influ- Athens, Aesc~nesnotes that one ence of Islam and Christianity led to its Timarchus, who had ostensibly gone to disappearance. the port of Piraeus to learn the barbering BIBLIOGRAPHY. M. I. Artamonov, trade, had actually prostituted himself "Antropomodnye bozhestva v religii to sailors there. skifov" (Anthropomorphicdivinities in 1172 .'.:....+ ......