Religion shares with the sexual impulse the unceasing yearning, the sentiment of everlastingness, the mystic absorption into the depths of life, the longing for the coalescence of individualities in an eternally blessed union, free from earthly fetters. Hence the longing for death felt by lovers and by mystically enraptured pietists, which has been so wonderfully described by Leopardi. “The yearning for death felt by lovers is identical with the yearning for sexual union,” aptly remarks H. Swoboda, and he very rightly points out that many a suicide ascribed to “unfortunate love” is rather the result of a happy love. Among primitive peoples, and in ancient times, =religio-erotic festivals= first gave an opportunity for the manifestation of this religio-sexual mysticism. In this the transition of religious ecstasy into sexual perceptions is very clearly visible, and in the sexual orgies in which these religious frenzies often found an appropriate finale we see the crudest expression of the relationship between religion and sexuality. In such cases sexual ardour appears to be equivalent to a =prolongation= and an =increase= of the religious ardour--fundamentally, radically coincident, as the natural earthly discharge of an ecstatic tension directed to the sphere of the remote and the metaphysical. The fact that such sexual excesses are =throughout the world= found in association with religion, that since the very earliest times they have been connected with the =most various forms= of religion, proves once more that the origin of this relationship is dependent on the very nature of religion as such, and that it is =not in any way= due to the individual historic character of any one belief. It is, moreover, quite uncritical and altogether without justification for any modern writer to endeavour to make Roman Catholicism responsible for such an association; Roman Catholicism as such has as little to do with the matter as all other beliefs. Religio-sexual phenomena belong to the everywhere recurring =elementary ideas= of the human race (elementary ideas in the sense of Bastian); and the only way of regarding such phenomena that can be considered scientifically sound, is from the anthropological and ethnological standpoint. This sexual religious mysticism meets us everywhere--in the religious festivals of antiquity, the festivals of Isis in Egypt, and the festivals of imperial Rome, both alike accompanied by the wildest sexual orgies; in the festivals of Baal Peor, among the Jews, in the Venus and Adonis festivals of the Phœnicians, in Cyprus and Byblos, in the Aphrodisian, the Dionysian, and the Eleusinian festivals of the Hellenes; in the festival of Flora in Rome, in which prostitutes ran about naked; in the Roman Bacchanalia; and in the festival of the _bona dea_, the wild sexual licence of which is only too clearly presented to our eyes in the celebrated account of Juvenal.