Less consciously evoked for Burton a nostalgia

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The incessant quest for an identity gives to Burton (who affirmed that a man's greatness is measured in the strength of his passions) an eminently Nietzschean dimension. In fact, Burton conformed quite remarkably to the aristocratic ideal of the Uebermensch dear to the loner of Sils-Maria. As Michel Le Bris rightly notes in the preface to the French edition.

the human being is the only enigma which truly obsessed Burton, an enigma which he never ceased to explore. He had a latent talent like no other for disguising himself, assuming different personalities, assimilating into other cultures, penetrating other social structures. In this respect he could hardly have been further removed from the phone number list Bible-oriented, ethno-centric world of Imperial England, which indeed he profoundly despised. At once a mystic and an atheist, positivist and open to the irrational, Burton had an "ethno-differentialist" approach, to coin a phrase dear to the French New Right. He never hid his preference for the Orient, while Africa he described as a nightmare continent, "a mixture of horror and inhumanity, bestiality and blind ferocity".

Contact with other cultures more or for a traditional society freed of the perverse hold of Christianity, a view of him which is supported by his attitude towards sexuality. He intuitively believed that sexuality was one of the keys to explaining the conduct of different individuals. In this he was anticipating writers such as Freud and Havelock Ellis, and to a lesser extent Otto Weininger and Julius Evola. This explains his determination to assemble the largest possible collection of erotic texts, reviewing the entire gamut of erotic practices, all deviations and perversions, if need be out of his own experience, whence also his desire to translate and publish the great texts of erotica, capable in his view of liberating the Christian Occident, above all England, from its torment, so "corseted in decency and indecency". Outsider though he was, Burton may be considered a "good European" in the Nietzschean sense of the term, even if that fact does not provide all the answers to the enigma of his character.