Moreover, Carpenter points out, persons in whom the masculine and feminine temperaments were combined would in many cases be persons of intuition and complex mind beyond their fellows, and so able to exercise divination and prophecy in a very real and natural sense.[53] This aptitude of the invert for primitive religion, for sorcery and divination, would have its reaction on popular feeling, more especially when magic and the primitive forms of religion began to fall into disrepute.

The invert would be regarded as the sorcerer of a false and evil religion and be submerged in the same ignominy.

This point has been emphasized by Westermarck in the instructive chapter on homosexuality in his great work on Moral Ideas.[54] He points out the significance of the fact, at the first glance apparently inexplicable, that homosexuality in the general opinion of medieval Christianity was constantly associated, even confounded, with heresy, as we see significantly illustrated by the fact that in France and England the popular designation for homosexuality is derived from the Bulgarian heretics.

It was, Westermarck believes, chiefly as a heresy and out of religious zeal that homosexuality was so violently reprobated and so ferociously punished.
In modern Europe we find the strongest evidence of the presence of what may fairly be called true sexual inversion when we investigate the men of the Renaissance.

The intellectual independence of those days and the influence of antiquity seem to have liberated and fully developed the impulses of those abnormal individuals who would otherwise have found no clear expression, and passed unnoticed.[55] Muret, the Humanist, may perhaps be regarded as a typical example of the nature and fate of the superior invert of the Renaissance.