CONSUMPTION BY SEMEN LOSS IN INDIA AND ELSEWHERE

Using ethnographical data from a rural site of Oriya culture, the purpose of this article is to show that the Indian obsession regarding the harmful consequences of semen loss does not constitute a specific Indian culture-bound preoccupation, but represents a survival example of a much widespread system of beliefs that can be traced for instance in Western culture to the Hippocratic notion of "back consumption" and the classical concept of gonorrhoea. At the core of this system of beliefs are found ancient conceptions of the nature and functions of semen in human life. These conceptions and their cultural influences incidentally inform us about one of the origins of the reprobation of onanism, as well as one possible way, among many others, for traditional thinking to explain the clinical enigma of depressive syndrome. © 1991 Kluwer Academic Publishers.