CHAPTER I

LOVE POTIONS THROUGH THE AGES

_A Study of Amatory Devices and Mores_

HARRY E. WEDECK

_Lecturer in Classics, Brooklyn College of the City University, N. Y._

_Fellow, International Institute of Arts and Letters_

THE CITADEL PRESS

NEW YORK

FIRST PAPERBOUND EDITION

Published by The Citadel Press

222 Park Avenue South, New York 3, N. Y.

© Copyright, 1963

by Philosophical Library, Inc.

Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 62–18549

All rights reserved.

_Printed in the United States of America_

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ix

I ANTIQUITY 1

Erotic cults. Rites, Periapts. Phallic symbols. Ceremonials.

Concepts. Greece. Asia Minor. Egypt. Literary and historical

testimony. Erotic manifestations in various ethnic areas.

Search for amatory stimulants. Condemnation of pagan mores.

Biblical instances. Sacredness of genitalia. Herodotus on

Egyptian cults. Bacchic cult in European countries.

Pervasiveness of phallus. Phallic emblems. Biblical

references. Incantations. Spells. Philtres. Egyptian love

song. Near East. Hittite ritual. Babylon. Canaanites. Greece

and Rome. Biblical ethics. Hellenistic Age. Baths. Phallic

food. Drillipotae. Yellow. Figurae Veneris. Erotic poems.

Phallic divinities. Philodemus of Gadara. Dress. Athens.

Panders. Biblical—phallic. Power of woman. Woman as an evil.

Aphrodite. Love as an end. Initiation. Rites of Venus. Essence

of love. Mysticism. Priapic. Asia Minor. Variant names.

Generation. Talisman. Floral.

II GREEK 67

Plato. Dioscorides. Nonnus. Theodora. Antonina. Belisarius.

Demosthenes. Concept of love.

III ROMANS 82

Testimony of the poets. Obscene deities. Amatory philtres.

Amatory foods. Bacchic worship. Ovid on erotic practices. Ovid

on philtres. Roman generative deities. Rites of Bona Dea.

Generative tutelary deities. Phallic breads. Magic love

spells. Assignations. Fescennini versus. Lamps. Larentalia.

Heliogabalus. Nonaria. Nose and lips. Ovid. Imperial Rome.

IV ORIENT 119

Hindu and Arab treatments and practices. Philtres. Other

provocative preparations. Islam. Sterility. Potions. Perfume.

Arab erotologist. Amatory principles.

V INDIA 135

Erotic manuals. Amatory practices. Philtres. Other means of

stimulation. Temple prostitution. Search for husband.

VI VARIETIES AND OCCASIONS OF POTIONS 155

Examples from Greek and Roman antiquity. Asia. Love cult.

VII POTENCY OF PHILTRES 167

Literary testimony. Woman in the ascendant. Water.

Inducements.

VIII INGREDIENTS OF POTIONS. RECIPES. ANECDOTES 174

Preparation of philtres. Illustrative legendary, historical,

and literary anecdotes, allusions, and citations confirming

potency of philtres. Divertive philtres. Medieval philtres.

Macrobius. Herbs and plants. The Mill. Amatory procedures.

French stimulant. Papyri. Lucian. River. Black Art potion.

Inducements. Oriental. Flowers, etc. Variety of ingredients.

IX MIDDLE AGES AND LATER 231

Philtres. Dispensers of preparations. Occultists and

alchemists associated with preparations. Literary and

historical references. Manuals and other erotic texts. Priapus

as a saint. Phallic Society. Erotic mores in Europe. Clauder

on philtres. Northern deities. Belts of chastity. The

Congress: and other medieval practices. Divertive invocation.

Privileges. Orgies. Boccaccio. Turkey. Loïstes. Shakespeare.

Villon. Sects. Figurines. Demoniac unions. Astrological.

X MODERN TIMES 316

Contemporary eroticism. Amatory customs. Potions.

Publications. Experimentation in erotic stimuli. Literary

mention. Popular press. Love spells and potions. Bayadère.

Advertisements. Restaurants. Erotica. Books. Hippomanes.

SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY 335

INTRODUCTION

The amatory motif is pervasive, timeless, and universal. In some of its

phases and manifestations it has presented age-old provocations and, not

infrequently, problems that are still unresolved.

Among such problems are involved the faculty of physiological potency,

the urge to attract amorously, and, conversely, the problem of

preventing such attraction in a designated instance, or of diverting it

to another objective.

That, in brief, is the essence of the material means of effecting such a

realization. In its various mutations, its protean diversities, it is

the love-potion, the philtre, the mystic concoction that, once quaffed,

will instil love and passion and desire and lust, that will replenish

erotic inadequacies, that will awaken the ancient _fons vitae_, the

symbol of animate being, the source, as the antique Hellenes sensed and

exemplified, of all cosmic creation, of the totality of living

generation.

The potion, then, is at least a hypothetically efficacious instrument

for securing and preserving the amorous interests of the desired object.

It also serves as an apotropaic device for diverting misplaced love, as

the agent sees it, and redirecting it to the proper and preferred

channel.

The actual means for the fulfilment of these erotic purposes vary with

the ages, with ethnic groups and demographic alignments, with legendary

and folk traditions and mores, with the disparate levels of culture of a

specific region. They present variations and adaptations in

correspondence with climatic and epichorial conditions. But they retain

the essentially common characteristic, the unchanging property, of

attempting to shape and mould the amatory esurgences, in whatever

degree, and whether transitory or of more enduring permanence, by

impersonal, palpable, mechanistic and visual means.

It should be observed, as a _terminus a quo_, that the term philtre

itself stems from the Greek _philtron_, a love-potion (from _philein_,

to love, and _tron_, an instrumental suffix). It means, then, a

love-charm.

The term potion is derived immediately from the Latin _potio_, a

draught, whether of medicine or even of poison. The ultimate source is

the Greek _potos_, a drink. In a general sense, therefore, a love

philtre or potion is a concoction, usually liquid in form, but not

necessarily so, intended to produce or promote amatory sensibilities. In

a wide and comprehensive denotation, the philtre will include any object

or charm or periapt that serves the same erotic purpose.

This present survey touches on the use of the potion in the course of

the centuries, in varying circumstances and disparate countries: on the

fantastic factors that composed the final preparations; and on

anecdotes, both apocryphal and authenticated, and episodes and

occasional allusions that point up the treatment, its hazards, and even

its humors.

With regard to the potions and similar concoctions and preparations of

an amatory nature, a caveat must here be entered. All such philtres are

considered in this book from an exclusively traditional, historical, and

academic viewpoint. They are not recommended in any instance for

personal use, as they may involve unpredictable or even catastrophic

effects: in no sense, therefore, should such prescriptions be utilized

for empirical experimentation.

H.E.W.

_LOVE POTIONS THROUGH THE AGES_

CHAPTER I

ANTIQUITY

In ancient Greece, the climatic conditions, the long unending summer

days, the broad spaciousness of the sea, wine-dark and loud-sounding, as

Homer describes it, the secluded pools and fountains and glades, the

remote valleys, the snowy mountain summits were all alive, to the

Hellenic perceptive and imaginative mind, with graceful nymphs and

shaggy satyrs, with a multitude of anthropomorphic divinities, and with

the alluring pipes of Pan.

Under such conditions it was not difficult to conceive human life as

dominated by the cosmic creative force, and to do homage and obeisance

to the great god Dionysus, divinity of the fruitful wine, protector of

all procreative and generative functions.

The generative and sexual activities of the Greeks were, in general, so

freed from contrived restrictions, so much in harmony with their

instinctive and developed sensitivity to beauty of form, of movement, of

rhythm, that artificial aids and inducements to amatory performance were

far less necessary than they are in a highly complex and competitive and

in a sense exhausted contemporary social frame.

Hence we do not constantly hear of the _ad hoc_ use of philtres,

potions, and analogous means of stimulation. Yet their existence is

established, and in particular cases they were brought into effective

use. Xenocrates, a Greek physician of the first century A.D., as Pliny

the Elder records, advised drinking the sap of mallows as a love-potion.

Such a philtre, together with three mallow roots tied into a bunch,

would inflame the erotic passions of women.

Again, Dioscorides of Cilicia, in Asia Minor, an army physician who

flourished in the first century A.D., produced a _Materia Medica_ that

treated drugs, remedies, ingredients in a rational, systematic manner.

His text became a standard work, used for centuries, in both the East

and the West. He recommends the roots of boy-cabbage, soaked in fresh

goat’s milk. A good draught of this drink would be productive of intense

excitation of the sexual impulse.

Many spices, plants, herbs that were described, either by the

encyclopedists and historians or incidentally mentioned in dramatic

literature, in occasional poems, anecdotes or in epitomes of legends and

folklore, were of such obscurity and rarity that it is no longer

possible to ascertain the corresponding modern equivalent. There was, as

an instance, satyrion. It is frequently mentioned, both in Greek and

Roman contexts. Actually unidentifiable botanically, it may have been

analogous to the orchis. In Greek and also Roman antiquity it was

reputed to constitute a potent aphrodisiac, and is mentioned in an

accepted and traditional sense by writers such as Petronius, who

casually alludes to it in the course of his _Satyricon_ as a common

erotic aid.

The name satyrion is evidently associated with the Greek satyr, a wood

spirit, partly goat-like, and partly human. Attendants to the rustic god

Pan, the satyrs were known as bestial and lustful creatures, symbolic of

the basic sexual passion of man.

Botanically, satyrion is a plant with smooth leaves, red-tinted, and

equipped with a two-fold root. The lower part of this root was credited

anciently with promoting male conception, while the other part was

conducive to female conception. In its modern counterpart, satyrion has

been associated with the Iris florantina.

There is another variety of satyrion, called Serapias. This has

pear-shaped leaves and a tall elongated stem. Its root consists of two

tubers that have the appearance of testes. Unquestionably, the

association of the plant as an aphrodisiac derives from the orchidaceous

configuration of the root.

Remarkable properties were attributed to the root of satyrion. When it

was dissolved in goat’s milk, the erotic effect was so vigorous and

urgent that, as the Greek philosopher Theophrastus asserts in his

_Enquiry into Plants_, the potion produced, on a particular occasion,

some seventy consecutive coital performances.

Still another species of satyrion was erithraicon. This plant had a

peculiar virtue. The mere holding of it, or carrying it, in the hand,

occasioned a lustful desire. This fact is attested by Pliny, in his

_Natural History_, in Book 26, 96 and 98, as well as by Dioscorides in

his _Materia Medica_ 3. 134. When the libido became too intense, lettuce

was eaten to mitigate the effect, to allay the erotic provocation.

Greek mythology abounds in references to satyrion as an efficacious

stimulant. The prowess of Hercules, the lusty warrior, as the Roman

Petronius, Arbiter Elegantiarum, calls him, is attested in an amatory

sense by the story of his visit to a certain Thespius. Entertained

lavishly as a guest, Hercules, fortified by satyrion, repaid the host’s

entertainment by having intercourse with all fifty daughters of

Thespius.

In Roman times the effectiveness of the root in arousing erotic

excitation was common knowledge. Petronius, the voluptuary attached to

the court of the Emperor Nero and the author of the remarkable

picaresque novel entitled the _Satyricon_, alludes to the matter. One of

his characters, describing the frenzied activities in a brothel,

remarks:

We saw many persons of both sexes, at work in the cells, so much every

one of them seemed to have taken satyrion.

In a more general direction, important testimonies to manipulative and

mechanistic means of arousing vigor are the references in Petronius,

particularly the episode involving Quartilla:

Quartilla came up to me to cure me of the ague, but finding her

self disappointed, flew off in a rage, and returning in a little

while, told us, there were certain persons unknown, had a design

upon us, and therefore commanded to remove us into a noble

palace.

Here all our courage fail’d us, and nothing but certain death

seem’d to appear before us.

When I began, “If, madam, you design to be more severe with us,

be yet so kind as to dispatch it quickly; for whate’er our

offence be, it is not so heinous that we ought to be rack’d to

death for it”: Upon which her woman, whose name was Psyche,

spread a coverlet on the floor. Sollicitavit inguina mea mille

iam mortibus frigida. Ascyltos muffled his head in his coat, as

having had a hint given him, how dangerous it was to take notice

of what did not concern him: In the mean time Psyche took off

her garters, and with one of them bound my feet, and with the

other my hands.

Thus fetter’d as I lay, “This, madam,” said I, “is not the way

to rid you of your ague.”

“I grant it,” answer’d Psyche, “but I have a Dose at hand will

infallibly do it” and therefore brought me a lusty bowl of

satyricon and so merrily ran over the wonderful effects of it,

that I had well-nigh suck’d it all off; but because Ascyltos had

slighted her courtship, she finding his back toward her, threw

the bottom of it on him.

Ascyltos perceiving the chat was at an end, “Am not I worthy,”

said he, “to get a sup?” And Psyche fearing my laughter might

discover her, clapped her hands, and told him, “Young man, I

made you an offer of it, but your friend here has drunk it all

out.”

“Is it so,” quoth Quartilla, smiling very agreeably, “and has

Encolpius gugg’d it all down?” At last also even Gito laught for

company, at what time the young wench flung her arms about his

neck, and meeting no resistance, half smother’d him with kisses.

A peculiar situation in which erotic provocation or inducement to

passion is conditioned by the concept of social prestige, or, in the

contemporary idiom, status, is exemplified in a later passage in

Petronius’ _Satyricon_:

Going out full of these thoughts to divert my concern, I

resolv’d on a walk, but I had scarce got into a publick one,

e’re a pretty girl made up to me, and calling me Polyaemus, told

me her lady wou’d be proud of an opportunity to speak with me.

“You’re mistaken, sweet-heart,” return’d I, in a little heat,

“I’m but a servant, of another country too, and not worthy of so

great a favor.”

“No, sir,” said she, “I have commands to you; but because you

know what you can do, you’re proud; and if a lady wou’d receive

a favor from you, I see she must buy it: For to what end are all

those allurements, forsooth? the curl’d hair, the complexion

advanc’d by a wash, and the wanton roll of your eyes, the

study’d air of your gate? unless by shewing your parts, to

invite a purchaser? For my part I am neither a witch, nor a

conjurer, yet can guess at a man by his physiognomy. And when I

find a spark walking, I know his contemplation. To be short,

sir, if so be you are one of them that sell their ware, I’ll

procure you a merchant; but if you’re a courteous lender, confer

the benefit. As for your being a servant, and below, as you say,

such a favor, it increases the flames of her that’s dying for

you. ’Tis the wild extravagance of some women to be in love with

filth, nor can be rais’d to an appetite but by the charms,

forsooth of some slave or lacquy; some can be pleased with

nothing but the strutting of a prize-fighter with a hacktface,

and a red ribbon in his shirt: Or an actor betray’d to

prostitute himself on th’ stage, by the vanity of showing his

pretty shapes there; of this sort is my lady; who indeed,” added

she, “prefers the paultry lover of the upper gallery, with his

dirty face, and oaken staff, to all the fine gentlemen of the

boxes, with their patches, gunpowder-spots, and toothpickers.”

When pleas’d with the humor of her talk, “I beseech you, child,”

said I, “are you the she that’s so in love with my person?” Upon

which the maid fell into a fit of laughing.

“I wou’d not,” return’d she, “have you so extremely flatter

yourself. I never yet truckl’d to a waiter, nor will Venus allow

I shou’d imbrace a gibbet. You must address your self to ladies

that kiss the ensigns of slavery; be assur’d that I, though a

servant, have too fine a taste to converse with any below a

knight.” I was amaz’d at the relation of such unequal passions,

and thought it miraculous to find a servant, with the scornful

pride of a lady, and a lady with the humility of a servant.

A still more elaborate scene concerns the techniques of recovering the

faculty of erotic consummation. Encolpius, the narrator of the

_Satyricon_, is attached homosexually to the young Gito. He is in a

state of incapacity. At this juncture he receives a note from Circe, the

mistress of the maid Chrysis, commenting on his inadequacy:

Chrysis enter’d my chamber, and gave me a billet from her

mistress, in which I found this written:

“Had I rais’d my expectation, I might deceiv’d complain; now I’m

obliged to your impotence, that has made me sensible how much

too long I have trifl’d with mistaken hopes of pleasure. Tell

me, sir, how you design to bestow your self, and whether you

dare rashly venture home on your own legs? for no physician ever

allow’d it cou’d be done without strength. Let me advise your

tender years to beware of a palsie: I never saw any body in such

danger before. On my conscience you are just going! and shou’d

the same rude chilliness seize your other parts, I might be

soon, alas! put upon the severe trial of weeping at your

funeral. But if you would not suspect me of not being sincere,

tho’ my resentment can’t equal the injury, yet I shall not envy

the cure of a weak unhappy wretch. If you wou’d recover your

strength, ask Gito, or rather not ask him for’t—I can assure a

return of your vigor if you cou’d sleep three nights alone: As

to myself I am not in the least apprehensive of appearing to

another less charming than I have to you. I am told neither my

glass nor report does flatter me. Farewell, if you can.”

When Chrysis found I had read the reproach, “This is the custom, sir,”

said she, “and chiefly of this city, where the women are skill’d in

magick-charms, enough to make the moon confess their power, therefore

the recovery of any useful instrument of love becomes their care; ’tis

only writing some soft tender things to my lady, and you make her happy

in a kind return. For ’tis confest, since her disappointment, she has

not been her self.”

I readily consented, and calling for paper, thus addrest myself:

“’Tis confest, madam, I have often sinned, for I’m not only a

man, but a very young one, yet never left the field so

dishonorably before. You have at your feet a confessing

criminal, that deserves whatever you inflict: I have cut a

throat, betray’d my country, committed sacrilege; if a

punishment for any of these will serve, I am ready to receive

sentence. If you fancy my death, I wait you with my sword; but

if a beating will content you, I fly naked to your arms. Only

remember, that ’twas not the workman, but his instruments that

fail’d: I was ready to engage, but wanted arms. Who rob’d me of

them I know not; perhaps my eager mind outrun my body; or while

with an unhappy haste I aim’d at all; I was cheated with

abortive joys. I only know I don’t know what I’ve done: You bid

me fear a palsie, as if the disease you’d do greater that has

already rob’d me of that, by which I shou’d have purchas’d you.

All I have to say for my self, is this, that I will certainly

pay with interest the arrears of love, if you allow me time to

repair my misfortune.”

Having sent back Chrysis with this answer, to encourage my jaded body,

after the bath and strengthening oyles had a little rais’d me, I apply’d

my self to strong meats, such as strong broths and eggs, using wine very

moderately; upon which to settle my self, I took a little walk, and

returning to my chamber, slept that night without Gito; so great was my

care to acquit my self honorably with my mistress, that I was afraid he

might have tempted my constancy, by tickling my side.

The next day rising without prejudice, either to my body or spirits, I

went, tho’ I fear’d the place was ominous, to the same walk, and

expected Chrysis to conduct me to her mistress; I had not been long

there, e’re she came to me, and with her a little old woman. After she

had saluted me, “What, my nice Sir Courtly,” said she, “does your

stomach begin to come to you?”

At what time, the old woman, drawing from her bosom, a wreath of many

colors, bound my neck; and having mixed spittle and dust, she dipt her

finger in’t, and markt my forehead, whether I wou’d or not.

When this part of the charm was over, she made me spit thrice, and as

often prest to my bosom enchanted stones, that she had wrapt in purple;

Admotisque manibus temptare coepit inguinum vives. Dicto citius nervi

paruerunt imperio manusque aniculae ingenti motu repleverunt. At ilia

gaudio exsultans, “Vides,” inquit, “Chrysis mea, vides quod aliis

leporem excitavi?”

Never despair; Priapus I invoke

To help the parts that make his altars smoke.

After this, the old woman presented me to Chrysis; who was very glad she

had recover’d her mistress’s treasure; and therefore hastening to her,

she conducted me to a most pleasant retreat, deckt with all that nature

cou’d produce to please the sight.

Where lofty plains o’re-spread a summer shade,

And well-trimm’d pines their shaking tops display’d,

Where Daphne ’midst the Cyprus crown’d her head.

Near these, a circling river gently flows,

And rolls the pebbles as it murmuring goes.

A place design’d for love, the nightingale

And other wing’d inhabitants can tell.

That on each bush salute the coming day,

And in their orgies sing its hours away.

She was in an undress, reclining on a flowry bank, and diverting her

self with a myrtle branch; as soon as I appear’d, she blusht, as mindful

of her disappointment: Chrysis, very prudently withdrew, and when we

were left together, I approacht the temptation; at what time she

skreen’d my face with the myrtle, and as if there had been a wall

between us, becoming more bold; “what, my chill’d spark,” began she,

“have you brought all your self today?”

“Do you ask, madam,” I return’d, “rather than try?” And throwing myself

to her, that with open arms was eager to receive me, we last a little

age away; when giving the signal to prepare for other joys, she drew me

to a more close imbrace; and now, our murmuring kisses their sweet fury

tell; now, our twining limbs, try’d each fold of love; now, lockt in

each others arms, our bodies and our souls are join’d; but even here,

alas! even amidst these sweet beginnings, a sudden chilliness prest upon

my joys, and made me leave ’em not compleat.

Circe, enrag’d to be so affronted, had recourse to revenge, and calling

the grooms that belong’d to the house, made them give me a warming; nor

was she satisfi’d with this, but calling all the servant-wenches, and

meanest of the house, she made ’em spit upon me. I hid my head as well

as I cou’d, and, without begging pardon, for I knew what I had deserv’d,

am turn’d out of doors, with a large retinue of kicks and spittle:

Proselenos, the old woman was turn’d out too, and Chrysis beaten; and

the whole family wondering with themselves, enquir’d the cause of their

lady’s disorder.

I hid my bruises as well as I cou’d, lest my rival Eumolpus might sport

with my shame, or Gito be concern’d at it; therefore as the only way to

disguise my misfortune, I began to dissemble sickness, and having got in

bed, to revenge my self of that part of me, that had been the cause of

all my misfortunes; when taking hold of it,

With dreadful steel, the part I wou’d have lopt,

Thrice from my trembling hand the razor dropt.

Now, what I might before, I could not do,

For cold as ice the fearful thing withdrew;

And shrunk behind a wrinkled canopy,

Hiding his head from my revenge and me.

Thus, by his fear, I’m baulkt of my design,

When I in words more killing vent my spleen.

At what time, raising myself on the bed, in this or like manner, I

reproacht the sullen impotent: With what face can you look up, thou

shame of heaven and man? that can’st not be seriously mention’d. Have I

deserv’d from you, when rais’d within sight of heavens of joys, to be

struck down to the lowest hell? To have a scandal fixt on the very prime

and vigor of my years, and to be reduc’d to the weakness of an old man?

I beseech you, sir, give me an epitaph on my departed vigor; tho’ in a

great heat I had thus said:

He still continu’d looking on the ground,

Nor more, at this had rais’d his guilty head

Than th’ drooping poppy on its tender stalk.

Nor when I had done, did I less repent of my ridiculous passion, and

with a conscious blush, began to think, how unaccountable it was, that

forgetting all shame, I shou’d contend with that part of me, that all

men of sense, reckon not worth their thoughts. A little after, relapsing

to my former humor: But what’s the crime, began I, if by a natural

complaint I was eas’d of my grief? or how is it, that we blame our

stomachs or bellies, when ’tis our heads, that are distemper’d? Did not

Ulysses beat his breast, as if that had disturb’d him? And don’t we see

the actors punish their eyes, as if they heard the tragic scene? Those

that have the gout in their legs, swear at them; Those that have it in

their fingers, do so by them: Those that have sore eyes, are angry with

their eyes.

Why do the strickt-liv’d Cato’s of the age,

At my familiar lines so gravely rage?

In measures loosely plain, blunt satyr flows,

And all the people so sincerely shows.

For whose a stranger to the joys of love?

Who, can’t the thoughts of such lost pleasures move?

Such Epicurus own’d the chiefest bliss,

And such fives the gods themselves possess.

There’s nothing more deceitful than a ridiculous opinion, nor more

ridiculous, than an affected gravity. After this, I call’d Gito to me;

and “tell me,” said I, “but sincerely, whether Ascyltos, when he took

you from me, pursu’d the injury that night, or was chastly content to

lye alone?” The boy with his finger at his eyes, took a solemn oath,

that he had no incivility offer’d him by Ascyltos.

This drove me to my wits end, nor did I well know what to say: For why,

I consider’d, shou’d I think of the twice mischievous accident that

lately befell me? At last, I did what I cou’d to recover my vigor: and

willing to invoke the assistance of the gods, I went out to pay my

devotions to Priapus, and as wretched as I was, did not despair, but

kneeling at the entry of the chamber, thus beseecht the god:

Bacchus and Nymphs delight, O mighty God!

Whom Cynthia gave to rule the blooming wood.

Lesbos and verdant Thasos thee adore,

And Lydians, in loose flowing dress implore,

And raise devoted temples to thy power.

Thou Dryad’s joy, and Bacchus’s guardian, hear

My conscious prayer, with an attentive ear.

My hands with guiltless blood I never stain’d,

Or sacrilegiously the gods prophan’d.

To feeble me, restoring blessings send,

I did not thee, with my whole self offend.

Who sins thro’ weakness is less guilty thought,

Be pacify’d, and spare a venial fault.

On me, when smiling fate shall smiling gifts bestow,

I’ll not ungrateful to thy godhead go.

A destined goat shall on thy altar lye,

And the horn’d parent of my flock shall dye.

A sucking pig appease thy injur’d shrine,

And hallow’d bowls o’re-flow with generous wine.

Then thrice thy frantick votaries shall round

Thy temple dance, with youth and garlands crown’d,

In holy drunkenness thy orgies sound.

While I was thus at prayers, an old woman, with her hair about her eyes,

and disfigur’d with a mournful habit, coming in, disturb’d my devotions;

when taking hold of me, she drew all fear out of the entry; and “what

hag,” said she, “has devour’d your manhood? Or what ominous carcase have

you stumbl’d over in your nightly walks? You have not acquitted your

self above a boy; but faint, weak, and like a horse o’re-charg’d in a

steep, tyr’d have lost your toyl and sweat; nor content to sin alone,

but have unreveng’d against me, provokt the offended gods?”

When leading me, obedient to all her commands, a second time to the cell

of a neighboring priestess of Priapus, she threw me upon the bed, and

taking up a stick that fastened the door, reveng’d her self on me, that

very patiently receiv’d her fury: and at the first stroak, if the

breaking of the stick had not lessened its force, she might have broke

my head and arm.

I groan’d, and hiding with my arm my head, in a flood of tears lean’d on

the pillow: Nor did she then, less troubled, sit on the bed, and began

in a shrill voice, to blame her age, till the priestess came in upon us;

and “what,” said she, “do you do in my chappel, as if some funeral had

lately been, rather than a holy-day, in which, even the mournful are

merry?”

“Alas, my Enothea!” said she, “this youth was born under an ill star;

for neither boy nor maid can raise him to a perfect appetite; you ne’re

beheld a more unhappy man: In his garden the weak willow, not the lusty

cedar grows; in short, you may guess what he is, that cou’d rise unblest

from Circe’s bed.”

Upon this, Enothea fixt her self between us, and moving her head a

while; “I,” said she, “am the only one that can give remedy for that

disease; and not to delay it, let him sleep with me to-night; and next

morning, examine how vigorous I shall have made him:

“All Nature’s work my magick powers obey,

The blooming earth shall wither and decay,

And when I please, agen be fresh and gay.

From rugged rocks, I make sweet waters flow,

And raging billows to me humbly bow.

With rivers, winds, when I command, obey,

And at my feet, their fans contracted lay,

Tygers and dragons too, my will obey,

But these are small, when of my magick verse,

Descending Cynthia does the power confess.

When my commands, make trembling Phoebus reign,

His fiery steeds, their journey back again.

Such power have charms, by whose prevailing aid

The fury of the raging bulls was laid.

The Heaven-born Circe, with her magic song,

Ulysses’s men, did unto monsters turn.

Proteus, with this assum’d, what shape he wou’d.

I, who this art so long have understood,

Can send proud Ida’s top into the main,

And make the billows bear it up again.”

I shook with fear at such a romantick promise, and began more

intensively to view the old woman; Upon which, she cry’d out, “O

Enothea, be as good as your word”; when, carefully wiping her hands, she

lay down on the bed, and half smother’d me with kisses.

Enothea, in the middle of the altar, plac’d a turf-table, which she

heapt with burning coals, and her old crack cup (for sacrifice) repair’d

with temper’d pitch; when she had fixt it to the smoaking-wall from

which she took it; putting on her habit, she plac’d a kettle by the

fire, and took down a bag that hung near her, in which, a bean was kept

for that use, and a very aged piece of a hog’s forehead, with the print

of a hundred cuts out; when opening the bag, she threw me a part of the

bean, and bid me carefully strip it. I obey her command, and try,

without daubing my fingers, to deliver the grain from its nasty

coverings; but she, blaming my dullness, snatcht it from me, and

skilfully tearing its shells with her teeth, spit the black morsels from

her, that lay like dead flies on the ground. How ingenious is poverty,

and what strange arts will hunger teach? The priestess seemed so great a

lover of this sort of life, that her humor appear’d in every thing about

her, and her hut might be truly term’d, sacred to poverty:

Here shines no glittering ivory set with gold,

No marble covers the deluded mold,

By its own wealth deluded; but the shrine

With simple natural ornaments does shine.

Round Cere’s bower, but homely willows grow.

Earthen are all the sacred bowls they know.

Osier the dish, sacred to use divine:

Both course and stain’d, the jug that holds the wine.

Mud mixt with straw, make a defending fort,

The temple’s brazen studs, are knobs of dirt.

With rush and reed, is thatcht the hut it self,

Where, besides what is on a smoaky shelf,

Ripe service-berries into garlands bound,

And savory-bunches with dry’d grapes are found.

Such a low cottage Hecale confin’d,

Low was her cottage, but sublime her mind.

Her bounteous heart, a grateful praise shall crown,

And muses make immortal her renown.

After which, she tasted of the flesh, and hanging the rest, old as her

self, on the hook again; the rotten stool on which she was mounted

breaking, threw her into the fire, her fall spilt the kettle, and what

it held put out the fire; she burnt her elbow, and all her face was hid

with the ashes that her fall had rais’d.

Thus disturb’d, I arose, and laughing, took her up; immediately, lest

any thing shou’d hinder the offering, she ran for new fire to the

neighborhood, and had hardly got to the door, e’re I was set upon by

three sacred geese, that daily, I believe, about that time were fed by

the old woman; they made an hideous noise, and, surrounding me, one

tears my coat, another my shoes, while their furious captain made

nothing of doing so by my legs; till seeing my self in danger, I began

to be in earnest, and snatching up one of the feet of our little table,

made the valiant animal feel my arm’d hand; nor content with a slight

blow or two, but reveng’d my self with its death:

Such were the birds Alcides did subdue,

That from his conquering arm t’ward Heaven flew:

Such sure the harpyes were which poyson strow’d,

On cheated Phineus’s false deluding food.

Loud lamentations shake the trembling air,

The powers above the wild confusion share,

Horrors disturb the orders of the sky,

And frighted stars beyond their courses fly.

By this time the other two had eat up the pieces of the bean that lay

scatter’d on the floor, and having lost their leader, return’d to the

temple. When glad of the booty and my revenge, I heal’d the slight old

woman’s anger, I design’d to make off; and taking up my cloaths, began

my march; nor had I reach’d the door, e’re I saw Enothea bringing in her

hand an earthen pot fill’d with fire; upon which I retreated, and

throwing down my cloaths, fixt my self in the entry, as if I were

impatiently expecting her coming.

Enothea, entring, plac’d the fire, that with broken sticks she had got

together, and having heapt more wood upon those, began to excuse her

stay, that her friend wou’d not let her go before she had, against the

laws of drinking, taken off three healths together. When looking about

her, “What,” said she, “have you been doing in my absence? Where’s the

bean?”

I, who thought I had behav’d my self very honorably, told her the whole

fight; and to end her grief for the loss of her bean, presented the

goose: when I shew’d the goose, the old woman set up such an outcry,

that you wou’d have thought the geese were re-entering the place.

In confusion and amaz’d at so strange a humor, I askt the meaning of her

passion? or why she pity’d the goose rather than me.

But wringing her hands, “you wicked wretch,” said she, “d’ye speak too?

D’ye know what you’ve done? You’ve killed the gods delight, a goose the

pleasure of all matrons: And, lest you shou’d think your self innocent,

if a magistrate shou’d hear of it, you’d be hang’d. You have defil’d

with blood my cell, that to this day had been inviolate. You have done

that, for which, if any’s so malicious, he may expel me my office.”

She said, and trembling, rends her aged hairs,

And both her cheeks with wilder fury tears:

Sad murmurs from her troubl’d breast arise,

A shower of tears there issu’d from her eyes.

And down her face a rapid deluge run,

Such as is seen, when a hills frosty crown,

By warm Favonius is melted down.

Upon which, “I beseech you,” said I, “don’t grieve, I’ll recompence the

loss of your goose with an ostrich.”

While amaz’d I spoke, she sat down on the bed, lamented her loss; at

what time Proselenos came in with the sacrifice, and viewing the

murder’d goose, and enquiring the cause, began very earnestly to cry and

pity me, as it had been a father, not a goose I had slain. But tired

with this stuff, “I beseech you,” said I, “tell me, tho’ it had been a

man I kill’d, won’t gold wipe off the guilt? See here are two pieces of

gold: with these you may purchase gods as well as geese.”

Which, when Enothea beheld, “Pardon me, young man,” said she, “I am only

concern’d for your safety, which is an argument of love, not hatred;

therefore we’ll take what care we can to prevent a discovery: You have

nothing to do, but intreat the gods to forgive the sin.”

Who e’re has money may securely sail,

On all things with all-mighty gold prevail.

May Danae wed, or rival amo’rous Jove,

And make her father pandar to his love.

May be a poet, preacher, lawyer, too:

And bawling win the cause he does not know:

And up to Cato’s fame for wisdom grow.

Wealth without law will gain at bar renown,

How e’re the case appears, the cause is won,

Every rich lawyer is a Littleton.

In short of all you wish you are possest,

All things prevent the wealthy mans’ request,

For Jove himself’s the treasure of his chest.

While my thoughts were thus engag’d, she plac’d a cup of wine under my

hands, and having cleans’d my prophane extended fingers with sacred

leeks and parsley, threw into the wine, with some ejaculations,

hazel-nuts, and as they sunk or swam gave her judgment; but I well knew

the empty rotten ones wou’d swim, and those of entire kernels go to the

bottom.

When applying herself to the goose, from its breast she drew a lusty

liver, and then told me my future fortune. But that no mark of the

murder might be left, she fixt the rent goose to a spit, which, as she

said, she had fatten’d a little before, as sensible it was to die.

In the mean time the wine went briskly round, and now the old women

gladly devour the goose, they so lately lamented; when they had pickt

its bones, Enothea, half drunk, turn’d to me; “and now,” said she, “I’ll

finish the charm that recovers your strength”: When drawing out a

leathern ensign of Priapus, she dipt it in a medley of oyl, small

pepper, and the bruis’d seed of nettles, paulatim coepit inserere ano

meo. Hoc crudelissima anus spurgit subinde umore femina mea. Nasturcii

sucum cum abrotano miscet perfusisque inguinibus meis viridis urticae

fascem comprehendit, omniaque infra umbilicum coepit lenta manu caedere.

Upon which jumping from her, to avoid the sting, I made off. The old

woman in a great rage pursu’d me, and tho’ drunk with wine, and their

more hot desires, took the right way; and follow’d me through two or

three villages, crying stop thief; but with my hands all bloody, in the

hasty flight, I got off.

* * * * *

[Illustration:

National Gallery of Art

THE KISS

_by Rodin_

]

[Illustration:

Metropolitan Museum of Art

BESIDE THE SEA

_by Rodin_

]

Love manifestations and the passion for promoting weakened or inadequate

functional activity are familiar themes in the most remote areas of the

world. In the Arctic circle as well as in the Marshall Islands. Among

the Eskimo of uttermost Greenland and among the Jibaro Indians of

Equador. The Orang Kubau of Sumatra and the Semang and Senoi of Malacca

are knowledgeable in this regard. The natives of these disparate

territories are familiar with the plant and animal life of their

regions, the nuts and fruits, the herbs and leaves, and their properties

and specific virtues. They have tested them in food and drink, and in

other functional directions: and by long, groping, deductive sequences

they have come to definite practical conclusions. They have managed to

extract or to use certain essences and elements in these roots and

plants that they found conducive to specific purposes, particularly to

the primary function of life, the erotic motif, the functional

performance.

Oral traditions, the ways of the tribal society, derive,

pre-historically, from a matriarchal hierarchy. And to the women of the

tribe the obscure secrets of amorous practices and devices are

all-important. Because they are the conditions of procreation, the

source of fertility, the depositories of life and continuity. The love

mystique, then, is the primary and virtually exclusive sacrosanct

knowledge confined to the female of the tribe. Hence, after the ages of

oral transmission, when we enter upon the centuries of writing, verbal

transcription, and recording, then the sagas and chronicles, the legends

and folk consciousness, invariably dwell on the female, the wise old

woman, the witch, the adept, who possesses the arcana of erotic

functions.

In the course of undetermined time, as literary mastery grows and

develops culturally to the degree attained by Greece in the fifth

century B.C., the witch, as guardian of Aphrodite’s mysteries, is

paramount. She is known to the peasant and the hoplite, to the cobbler

and the young athlete, to the stroller in the agora, to the serious

dramatist, even to the philosophers, to Socrates, to Plato.

* * * * *

In classical legend, Phaon, a ferryman of Lesbos, was given a potent

periapt by Aphrodite, that made him remarkably handsome. The poetess

Sappho consequently fell passionately in love with him. According to the

Roman encyclopedist Pliny the Elder, author of the _Historia Naturalis_,

Phaon had found a mandrake root that resembled the male genitalia. This

root was an assurance of feminine love. Sappho, however, is said, in the

version of Ovid’s _Heroides_, to have flung herself from the Leucadian

rock on his account.

* * * * *

Xenophon, the Greek historian who belongs in the fourth century B.C.,

recounts, in his _Memorabilia_, a dialogue between the philosopher

Socrates and a hetaira named Theodote. The subject is the art of finding

and retaining lovers.

Socrates: There are my lady friends, who will never let me leave them,

night or day. They would always be having me teach them

love-charms and incantations.

Theodote: Are you really acquainted with such things, Socrates?

Socrates: Of course I am. What else is the reason, think you, that

Apollodorus and Antisthenes never leave my side? Why have Cebes

and Simmias come all the way from Thebes to stay with me? You may

be quite sure that not without love-charms and incantations and

magic-wheels can this be brought about.

Theodote: Lend me your wheel, then, that I may use it on you.

Socrates: Nay, I do not want to be drawn to you. I want you to come to

me.

Theodote: Well, I will come. But be sure to be at home.

Socrates: I will be at home to you, unless there be some lady with me

who is dearer than yourself.

* * * * *

A speech attributed to the Greek orator Antiphon, who dates in the fifth

century B.C., involves a belief that love could be secured by the

administration of a potion.

The Attic orator is addressing the court:

The girl began to consider how she should administer the potion

to them, before or after dinner, and, on reflection, she decided

it would be better to give it after the meal. I will endeavor to

give you a brief account of how the potion was actually

administered. The two friends partook of a good dinner, as you

can imagine, the host having a sacrifice to offer to the god of

his household and the guest being on the eve of a sea voyage.

When they had finished, they made a libation and added thereto

some grains of incense. But while they were murmuring their

prayer, the concubine slipped the poison into the wine she was

pouring out for them: and furthermore, thinking that she was

doing something clever, she gave Philoneos an extra dose,

supposing that the more she gave the warmer would be his love

for her.

The important deduction that follows as a corollary from the above

passage is that the love-potion, mentioned without elaborate comment,

was already, in the fifth century B.C., a matter of common knowledge and

common use.

* * * * *

The plant called anciently telephilon was used by the Greeks for amatory

purposes. Botanically, it has been identified with the poppy: and by

some, with a kind of pepper tree. Theocritus, the Greek bucolic poet,

refers to its use in the third Idyll. A goatherd goes to the cave of his

sweet-heart Amaryllis. He tries to re-awaken her former love:

I learned my fate but lately, when upon my bethinking me whether

you loved me, not even did the poppy leaf coming in contact make

a sound, but withered away just so upon my soft arm.

Lovers were accustomed to guess by the poppy leaf placed between

forefinger and thumb of the left hand, and then struck by the right,

whether their love was reciprocated. If a loud crack was produced, it

was a propitious amatory omen.

* * * * *

Among the ancient authorities the virtues of plants and herbs and spices

and their medicinal curative powers and also their amatory impacts were

frequently enumerated, described, and classified. In this group belongs

Dioscorides, a Greek army surgeon who flourished in the first century

A.D. His comprehensive treatise on the subject, _De Materia Medica Libri

Quinque_, was for centuries consulted and used as a standard text. In

the Middle Ages the famous Portuguese Marrano physician Amatus Lusitanus

produced an excellent edition of Dioscorides. It was published, with

numerous woodcut illustrations, at Leyden in Holland, in 1558.

* * * * *

According to the _Enquiry into Plants_ by Theophrastus, and equally to

the _Materia Medica_ of the Greek army surgeon Dioscorides, cyclamen,

which is sowbread, had erotic properties. The root of the plant was used

as an ingredient in love-potions.

The plant itself produces colorful flowers, while the fleshy roots are

favored by swine: hence the old name of sowbread.

* * * * *

The Greek physician Dioscorides, who served as a surgeon in the army of

the Roman Emperor Nero, mentions, in his _Materia Medica_, mandrake as

being anciently considered efficacious in love philtres. He also alludes

to the practice in his own days, when a concoction of the root of

mandrake steeped in wine was judged to be a favorable love-potion.

* * * * *

In the furious and unceasing search for some product of the earth, some

fabricated distillation, some suddenly and miraculously discovered

triumphant panacea that would efficaciously induce virile activity, the

ancients grasped at any object that, by its mere outward and physical

conformation, might conceivably have some cryptic, symbolic association

with genital resemblances, and hence with amatory functions.

Such a resemblance was readily and gratefully found in the mandrake. The

mandrake, even in Biblical times, was credited with unique properties,

not least, with amatory stimulation.

Mandrake, or mandragore, which is botanically mandragora, mandragora

officinarum, is a tuber with purple flowers, dark-leaved. It is native

to Palestine, and hence has a Hebrew name, mentioned in Biblical

literature. It is called there dudaim, an expression associated

etymologically with _love_.

The peculiarity of mandrake is that it often assumes a human shape, the

limbs in particular being formed like human extremities.

From the earliest literary eras mandrake was a customary ingredient in

love-potions. Circe, the sorceress who appears in Homer’s _Odyssey_, was

traditionally an adept in concocting brews with mandrake infusions. So

intimately was her name linked with this man-shaped plant, that it

became known as _Circe’s plant_.

As later Biblical confirmation of the significance of mandrake, the

strange and moving episode of Jacob and Rachel and the employment of the

very effective mandrake may be mentioned.

There is a further suggestion of its use in the Song of Songs.

The Greeks and the Romans likewise were acquainted with mandrake and its

virtues. The Greeks considered the root an amatory excitant, and, by

association, called Aphrodite, who presided over amatory functions,

Mandragoritis, She of the Mandrake. Plutarch, the Greek philosopher and

biographer, alludes to the plant and its resemblance to human genitalia.

In his monumental encyclopedia, the _Natural History_, the Roman Pliny

the Elder similarly dwells on this likeness, and adds that when a

mandrake root that has grown into male genital form is found, it will

unquestionably secure feminine love.

Without interruption the tradition of the mandrake lingered through the

centuries. Old chroniclers allude to it. Woodcuts and illustrations in

medieval vellum-bound folios present readers with the horrifyingly

semi-human form of the plant. Sinister and abhorrent legends have grown

up around the plant, many of them associated with death, gibbets,

hangings, thieves.

Medieval folklore trusted to the consumption of the root as a reliable

help in conception. This belief is also confirmed by a seventeenth

century traveler. Sorcerers and alchemists and other occult

practitioners concocted their elixirs with the aid of mandrake.

The seventeenth century English herbalist, John Gerarde, refers to

mandrake in his _Herball or General Historie of Plantes_, and to its use

in conception, particularly in the case of barrenness. He merely touches

on its employment in amatory practices, but he is repulsed by the

prurient and salacious nature of these devices.

In these days, too, mandrake evidently has not been neglected as a

possible invigorating agent. In Greece and in Italy, folk beliefs in the

plant still survive, and are put into active practice.

* * * * *

Sexual and procreative capacity was such a primal, essential factor in

the old religious cults that, in classical mythology, Greek and Roman,

and in Egyptian and Asian cults as well, the bull, the most potent among

animals, was the ceremonial and pictorial symbol of this cosmic power.

The bull, in fact, was equated with divinity. The processional sacrifice

among the Romans, the taurobolium, highlighted the preeminence and the

reverence due to the bull. In Egypt, he appears as Apis, the bull-god.

He is also present in the Mithraic cult, and Mithra himself is

sculpturally represented as holding a bull and cutting its throat. The

bull was an expiatory sacrifice among the Germanic tribes, and also

among the Northmen. In the Orient, too, the bull is sacred among the

Japanese. Cows, also, have been no less venerated among the Greeks, the

Hebrews, and the Hindus.

* * * * *

An ancient Egyptian record, the Doulaq Papyrus, reveals, in the

translation by the famous Egyptologist Sir William Flinders Petrie, how

even in antiquity sexual passion was channeled, promoted, and

controlled: and how the cult of money and the phallic cult often went

hand in hand and were intimately linked together. So that religious

prostitution, the sacred erotic rites of pagan worship, transcended the

common activities of the public prostitute and assumed a hieratic,

reverential status.

This status is stressed and confirmed in the story of the sacred

prostitute or hierodule Thubui, who was approached by Setna-Khamois, son

of the Egyptian Pharaoh Usimares. In the papyrus the lavish richness of

the hierodule’s apartment is described, and the bloody conditions she

exacts from her passionate prospective lover.

* * * * *

In the barber shops and the perfumers’, in the furtive taverns and the

baths and eating places, in Greece and later on in Rome, the lower types

of prostitute plied their trade. They might ostensibly be musicians and

singers of a sort, but these qualifications were mere preliminaries to

their more intimate ministrations. The ways of these harlots, their

outlook, their training, their future, are described vividly in Lucian’s

Dialogues of the Courtesans and in Alciphron’s fictional letters. The

poets, too, have their say about this institution, and many of their

pieces, sensuous and sensual, erotic, scatological and lewd, are

preserved in the Greek Anthology and the Palatine Anthology. In the

collection known as The Girdle of Aphrodite, one of the pieces deals

with the theme of Lolita. Another describes the operations of a

masseuse. Others deal with amorous performances and reflect on love and

its price.

* * * * *

The ancient cult of Bacchus, the god of wine and fertility, was marked

by highly erotic rites and orgies and phallic manifestations. Bacchus

himself was equated with the Greek god Dionysus, whose characteristics

and functions were identical. Dionysus himself was associated with

certain animals that were reputedly extremely lascivious by nature or

erotically exceptionally dominant. Among these animals were: the bull,

the ass, the panther, and the goat. The right testis of the ass, for

instance, worn in a bracelet, was, according to the testimony of Pliny

the Elder, who produced an encyclopedic Natural History, and the Greek

physician Dioscorides, considered an effective sexual stimulant.

In many regions of ancient Greece, both on the mainland but particularly

in the islands of the Aegean Sea, the Dionysiac cult was prevalent and

passionately celebrated.

Euripides, the Greek tragic poet, presents a detailed and authoritative

picture of Bacchic ceremonies and beliefs in his drama The Bacchae.

* * * * *

Among the priests of ancient Chaldea, noted for its thaumaturgic

practices and esoteric cults, there was a tradition that the secretions

of the liver of young boys would be a restorative of physiological

vigor.

* * * * *

Among professional Greek and Roman courtesans, there were special

devices for provoking male interest. During entertainments, for

instance, drinking cups, made of earthenware, emitted a perfumed aura,

while the contents themselves, containing myrrh and pepper, were direct

stimulants.

* * * * *

In Asia Minor, some four millennia ago, the Sumerians flourished and

produced a high literary culture. There is still extant a love song,

chanted annually by the Sumerians, that is in the manner of the Biblical

_Song of Songs_. It is an exultant amatory paean, dedicated to Inanna,

the Sumerian goddess of love and procreation, who may be equated with

the Babylonian Astarte and the Greek Aphrodite.

* * * * *

Storgethron, a plant used in ancient Greece as an amatory medicine, has

been identified as the leek.

* * * * *

The root called surag was, in antiquity, held to have a stimulative

virtue.

* * * * *

The aromatic leaves of tarragon, which grows in South East Europe, is

considered, in addition to its use as a flavoring agent, as an amatory

aid.

* * * * *

The oil extracted from the fresh leaves of the ruta graveolens plant

produces an amatory excitation.

* * * * *

Both in ancient and in medieval days amatory virtues were attributed to

the plant known botanically as radix Chinae.

* * * * *

The juice of the plant spurge, in composition with other items such as

ginger, nettle seed, pellitory, cinnamon, and cardamom, is considered,

among Arabs, as highly provocative.

* * * * *

The aromatic leaves of sage had an amatory repute. So with tulip bulbs

and savory which the Romans knew as satureia.

* * * * *

Hierobota, or pisteriona, an herb mentioned by the medieval philosopher

Albertus Magnus, was credited with such potency that its mere possession

was said to act as a stimulant.

* * * * *

Pimpinella anisum, which is the botanical designation of anise, is

native to the Eastern Mediterranean region. The ancients knew anise, and

it was equally familiar to the Middle Ages, as a love attribute.

* * * * *

The testes of animals have always been popular in amatory preparations,

both for their symbolic implications and also for their genesiac value.

This was the case with the testes of lamb, deer, ram, and ass.

* * * * *

The head of the perch contains a number of small stones. These were

included in the amatory preparations devised by sorceresses.

* * * * *

A French physician, Mery, in a treatise entitled _Traité Universel des

Drogues Simples_, stated that the partes genitales of a rooster served

as a potent stimulus.

* * * * *

Partridge was, according to the old writer Platina, in his _De

Valetudine Tuenda_, believed, apart from its gastronomic relish, to

‘arouse the half-extinct desire for venereal pleasures.’

* * * * *

In antiquity, snails were consumed for amatory purposes. The Roman poets

refer to this practice. Even in modern times a concoction of snails,

boiled in parsley, garlic, and onions, and fried in oil and again in red

wine, is reputed to serve as a rejuvenating factor.

* * * * *

An ancient Egyptian device for achieving amatory efficiency involves a

magic procedure:

Take a band of linen, of sixteen threads. Four of them white.

Four, green. Four, blue. Four, red. Fasten all strands into one

band, and strain with hoopoe blood. Bind with scarab posed as

the sun-god wrapped in byssus. Bind to the body of the boy

attendant who holds the sacred vessel.

* * * * *

The worship of the phallus in antiquity was not originally the worship

of the human generative organs, but of the divine procreative faculty

symbolized by the genitalia of the sacred bull and the sacred goat: in

Egyptian religious terminology, by Apis and Priapis or Priapus

respectively.

In Greece, the phallus, originally symbolic of the goat or bull, was

attached, disproportionately and _a posteriori_, to a human figure: so

that the phallus, in the course of time, became erroneously associated

with human capacity.

* * * * *

The Athenian orator Isocrates postulated a maxim: What is improper to do

is improper to say. Yet a rigid adherence to this view would mean a

cessation of investigations of all kinds, of many historical records and

archives, mores, and often matter that would give enlightenment on human

traditions and the more intimate details of communal, tribal, or

national life, of ethnic distinctions, of cultural progression.

Hence it might be more advisable to adapt the postulate of Isocrates and

to introduce the proviso that whatever has been done or said or written

by men should normally and regularly be transmitted to later generations

or to wider circles, provided that this transmission is intended as a

contribution to a knowledge of the past, or of contiguous races, or of

disparate mores, and as a revealing exposition of what man performed in

earlier ages, and not as a prurient and lewd inducement to wallow in

scatological or libidinous depths for mere light or indifferent or

transitory entertainment.

The anthropologist, the archaeologist, the professional scholar, the

historian are, by virtue of their interests and training and their

occupations, constantly dealing with subjects that have either been

taboo in a general sense, or that involve the most secretive

physiological and emotional human situations.

* * * * *

The ancient cult of the stars merged with religious ceremonials and

religious beliefs, emerging in the zodiacal bull. This bull was

anciently equated with the sun in its most auspicious phase, in spring

time. The sun bull later became the actual bull itself, as in the Minoan

and the Mithraic cults, and also among the Egyptians. For the bull was

now definitely the symbol of creative potency, of cosmic fecundity and

perpetuation.

* * * * *

The energized, salient phallus was the supreme symbol of being and

fertility. In antiquity it had divine significance. It was carried in

religious processions in ancient Egypt, in Greece, in the Greek islands,

in Phoenicia, Assyria, and in Chaldea and Ethiopia. In Egypt, phalli,

made of porcelain, were worn on the person as periapts.

* * * * *

In their fulminations against pagan mores and the sexual and erotic

licentiousness and aberrations that were so prevalent in antiquity both

socially and religiously, the ancient writers themselves were so

descriptively forthright and detailed in their denunciations, that these

very assaults and condemnatory attacks constitute in themselves,

cumulatively, a vast corpus of circumstantial knowledge of ancient

salaciousness, prurience, perversions, and total abandonment of amatory

and sexual restraints. Among such witnesses and authorities were the

Church Fathers Tertullian, Arnobius, and Clement of Alexandria.

The religious practice of women submitting or rather offering themselves

to the priapic symbol, the phallus or lingam, dates back to millennia

before this era. Herodotus, the Greek historian, mentions it; also

Strabo the geographer, and the Church Father Clement of Alexandria.

* * * * *

Among the ancient Moabites, the god Baal-Peor, that was at one time

worshipped by the Israelites and then execrated, was an idol equated

with the Greek and Roman phallic Priapus.

* * * * *

The consciousness that in Nature, in the totality of the cosmic scheme,

and in human beings the love motif conditions all existence and the

continuance of being is manifest in the images, the religious rituals,

symbols, ceremonials, and sacrificial offerings of all peoples, in every

age, ancient and modern, in Greece and among the Romans, in

pre-conquered Mexico and in India, throughout the East and in the

Pacific Islands, and among the early tribal and racial denominations of

Europe—the Germani and the Suevi, the Galli and the Normanni.

* * * * *

On the banks of the Euphrates, in Syria, there was anciently a vast,

elaborate, richly decorated and endowed temple. At the entrance rose two

gigantic phalli, dedicated, as the inscription ran, by Bacchus to the

goddess Juno. Offerings were made to the phalli by the thronging

suppliants, while within the building numerous wooden phalli were

dispersed throughout the spacious interior. Similar images and rituals

were manifest in contiguous countries, in Phoenicia, Persia, and

Phrygia.

* * * * *

Throughout every polis and colony and settlement of ancient Greece, and

also in the regions of the Mediterranean littoral, in Egypt and the

Middle East, the phallus was a symbol of veneration always associated

with religious ritual, with hieratic traditions, and temple worship on a

wide and enthusiastic scale.

In Greece, there were the phallic hermae, enormous phalli attached to

pedestals, tree-trunks, boundary-markers. They were protective and

apotropaic, and where the phalli appeared, there would credibly be

fecundity and erotic consummation, generation and abundance, in man and

beast and throughout the cosmic design.

The phallus was variously named Priapus and Tutunus and Mutunus and

Fascinum and, in Hindu religious mythology, the lingam. Among the

esoteric Gnostics, Jao, the sun-god, equipped with ithyphallic force,

had properties akin to those of Priapus. Thus the generative, energizing

organs of virility, of the cosmic erotic impulse and of its purpose,

are, despite variations of name and epichorial traits and accretions,

basically comprehended under one concept, in all proto-history, in

verifiable history, and, by traditional progression, in later ages.

* * * * *

Antiquity, free from the modern attitude that makes demarcations between

what is obscene and what is not so, venerated the sexual act, and its

symbolic representation of the phallus, as significant of the universal

sense of generation and procreation. As a consequence, all sexual, all

amatory performances, references, allusions were accepted as an integral

element in human life, and involved no intrusive image of salaciousness,

prurience, lewdness.

This phallic reverence, in its widest and most sweeping sense, was

especially prevalent among the ancient Greeks. But it was not confined

to this people. It was prevalent in Asia Minor, among the Hittites and

the Sumerians, the Accadians and the Parthians, the Medes and the

Babylonians and the Phoenicians. It was prevalent in Egypt and the North

African littoral, and it was equally prevalent along the Mediterranean

coastal regions. In the Far East, particularly but not exclusively in

India, the cult of the phallus was a devout religious experience,

equated with the dominant cults of the cosmic deities.

In later ages, when the human body became as it were dichotomous in

function, the merely physiological acts began to be held in lesser

esteem, and even became condemnatory in status, open to reproach and

disdain, and even violent abuse and ill-treatment. The body, in fact,

became obscene, invested with evil forces, compounded of malefic and

defiled factors. The body was to be crushed and tortured and disfigured,

in order to release the spiritual complements of the human being. The

amatory acts were now turned into licentious and mephitic obscenities,

into bestial defilements, into unspeakable carnal and animal

manifestations of the lower nature. As a consequence, phallic worship,

the glorification of the creative principle embodied in the male and

female, went underground. And by the mere fact of going underground, it

persisted, with qualifications, acquiring through the course of time

veneers of secrecy, accretions of furtiveness, elements of ribaldry as a

kind of protective coat.

* * * * *

Essentially, the phallic symbol was anciently viewed as an amatory

agent, a generative stimulant, in as much as the phallus was cosmically

the source of all being. Therefore offerings were made to the phallus in

sacrificial rituals, just as to any other potent deity from whom

privileges and favors were sought. Libations of milk were a normal form

of offering to Priapus. Women, anxious to become mothers, stood

reverently and suppliantly in puris naturalibus before the all-potent

phalli, and in a further urgent procedure, performed the act of erotic

consummation with the aid of the lingam figure itself. For the phallus,

in a pose of lubricity, was the final appeal, the ultimate resort, of

the pleading, awed, reverential mortal.

* * * * *

Among cities where the generative force symbolized by the phallus was

held in deep veneration, were Orneae, Cyllene, and Colophon. Under the

later impact of Christianity, however, the phallic cult diminished in

its influence and extent, or was re-directed into other channels. In one

specific direction, the cult merged into the Orphic mysteries.

* * * * *

Erotic awareness never went further than in the case of a city in Troas

named Priapus, on account of its consecration to the cult of the

phallus. There were other cities too, according to the testimony of

Pliny the Elder, that were named Priapus for identical reasons. In the

Ceramic Gulf there was an island named Priaponese: and an island in the

Aegean Sea called Priapus.

* * * * *

A notorious incident in Greek history involved the nocturnal mutilation

of hermae, in 415 B.C. Hermae were bronze or marble pillars surmounted

by a head and a phallus. These marble figures appeared in the streets

and squares of Athens and other Greek cities.

Suspicion for the defilement and desecration of the hermae fell upon the

brilliant but wayward Athenian general and statesman Alcibiades and his

companions. As a result, Alcibiades was condemned to banishment.

* * * * *

The cult of Priapus and his obscene association with the genitalia of

the ass, the symbol of unbridled lust, were expounded in ancient fable

and legend. Other commentaries and explanations were added later by

Hyginus, who flourished in the first century A.D. Hyginus wrote on

religious subjects and mystic cults. Pausanias, the Greek traveler and

geographer, who belongs in the second century A.D., and Lactantius, the

fourth century Church Father, also dwelt on the subject.

* * * * *

Of all cities of ancient Greece, Lampsacus, situated on the banks of the

Hellespont, was most dedicated to the veneration of Priapus. In a

legendary fable it was demonstrated that the origin of the priapic cult

was Lampsacus itself.

* * * * *

In the Greek festival called Thargelia, celebrated in May, the rites

were dedicated to Apollo, the sun god, and to Diana, the moon goddess.

At the ceremonial there was a procession of youths who carried olive

branches hung with food, fruit, and images of phalli.

* * * * *

The genesiac theme, in its most lustful implication, was so prevalent in

early history that there was a sect, known as the Baptae, dedicated to

Cotytto, an obscene and lewd goddess. They celebrated their nocturnal

abominations at Athens, Corinth, in Thrace, and on the island of Chios.

One of the peculiar features of the Baptae was their custom of drinking

from glass vessels shaped like a phallus. Juvenal, the Roman satirist,

in describing the Baptae and their mystic and symbolic rites, refers to

one participant who drinks from a glass Priapus: vitreo bibit ille

Priapo.

* * * * *

According to the testimony of the Greek historian Herodotus, a certain

Melampus brought the cult of Bacchus, the worship of the generative

capacity, to Greece, approximately in the thirteenth century B.C. He

expounded the features of the Egyptian cult and established processional

rites and ceremonies adapted from Egyptian usage.

* * * * *

In ancient Greece Bacchus, the phallic divinity, was equated with

Dionysus. In the cities the Greater Dionysia, or the Urban Dionysia,

were celebrated in his honor for three days. The locale was at Limnae in

Attica, and the season was the middle of the month of March.

In very early times, the Greek biographer and philosopher Plutarch

declares, the rites were of a simple but joyous nature. But in his own

time the celebration had reached a lavish, extravagant splendor.

Women, devotees of the Bacchic symbol and known as Bacchantes,

introduced the ritualistic procession. Chaste maidens, impeccable in

morality and of distinguished birth, followed. These were the

Canephoroi, the Basket-bearers who bore on their heads baskets

containing the sacred utensils used at the celebration: together with

mystic objects, flowers, salt, sesame, and a flower-bedecked phallus. A

detachment came next to the Canephoroi: these were the Phallophoroi. The

Phallophoroi were the Phallus-bearers, carrying, attached to long

staffs, the phallic emblem.

Musicians were also in the march, chanting and accompanying the choral

odes with twanging strings, and at brief intervals emitting loud

exclamations in glorification of the god.

There were other strange participants. The Ithyphalli, men dressed in

women’s garments, who chanted salacious phallic songs. Scandalous satyrs

led goats for sacrifice, while Bacchantes performed obscene dance

movements. There was, over the entire celebration, an atmosphere of

debauchery and libidinous license consonant with the phallic context of

the cult.

* * * * *

In Carthage, a spot outside the city was consecrated to Astarte, the

goddess of generation, and called Sicca Veneria. Among the Phoenicians a

similar spot, intended for the same purpose, that is religious

fornication, was known as Siccoth Venoth.

* * * * *

In Biblical antiquity, the primary concept was for man to be fruitful

and multiply, and replenish the earth. To this end, concubinage was

consequently not frowned upon and was practiced _pari passu_ with

marriage. Maid servants were commonly taken by their masters as

concubines, as in the case of Hagar, and also in that of Reumah. Lot

even gave his maiden daughters for the satisfaction of the lustful

inhabitants of Sodom. Later, he committed incest with these daughters.

The servant women of Jacob, Bilhah and Zilpah, became his concubines.

These are instances, among many others, that illustrate cases of

adultery and fornication that do not appear to have had a condemnatory

stigma or reproach attached to them. For the object in these

circumstances was procreation and propagation and that was the primal

function enjoined upon man.

The corollary is that sterility is a personal reproach in Biblical

times, a social defect that is looked upon with opprobrium, particularly

in Oriental countries.

* * * * *

In Spain, the phallic cult was practiced under the name of Hortanes.

This cult is mentioned by the Roman epic poet, Silius Italicus, in his

_Punica_. He describes the orgiastic revels of Satyrs and Maenads in

nocturnal rites in honor of the Hispanic fascinum.

In the South of France, also, and in Belgium, excavations unearthed

relics, monuments, amulets and other artifacts, bas-reliefs and

antiquities of various kinds, all testifying to the ancient cult of

Priapus and his functions and the deep and wide reverence for his

omnipotence. In Germany, Priapus lost the somewhat indulgent character

of a phallic and generative deity responsive to supplication and

promise, and became a violent, blood-lusting monstrosity. In parts of

Eastern Europe, again, Priapus became Pripe-Gala, sanguinary and

destructive.

* * * * *

Ancient Armenia had a deity analogous to Priapus or Aphrodite or

Astarte. She was known as Diana Anaïtis, and her cult involved temple

prostitution. The same practice, on the testimony of the Greek historian

Herodotus, was in vogue in Lydia. Another writer, the Roman geographer

Pomponius Mela, who belongs in the first century A.D., has similar

references in the case of an African people called the Augilae.

Again, the practice was prevalent at Naucratis, in Egypt.

* * * * *

The phallic cult, that was originally consecrated to the propagation of

all things, in as much as the fascinum itself symbolized the sacred

regeneration of all Nature, in time degenerated so that only the phallus

as such became the symbol of lust and passion and debauchery. It became

the emblem of excesses in erotic encounters, the sign of the prostitute.

Priapus actually became an object of some contempt, a humble scarecrow

of the fields, chthonic guardian of the orchards, a subject of coarse

ribaldry, as is testified in the Latin corpus of poems known under the

name of Priapeia.

* * * * *

The lascivious mores of the Egyptians under the guise of veneration of

the priapic bull Apis, and their obscene dances, rituals, and similar

performances are described and commented on in great detail by Herodotus

in his History of the Persian Wars.

* * * * *

The genitalia and all references to the phallic image were in very

ancient times held in such sacred esteem and reverence that in Biblical

literature the inviolable sanctity of an oath was ratified by touching

the area of the genitalia, or the thigh, to use the Biblical euphemism.

The Hebrews especially held the generative organs in the greatest

respect, socially, ethnically, and religiously: and nudity as a

consequence was a matter of shameful stigma and opprobrium.

Among the Moslems too the most binding oath was taken with respect to

the sanctity of the genitalia.

* * * * *

In Egypt, in the temple of Isis, sacred prostitution was a regular

religious practice. Reference to this circumstance is made by the Roman

satirist, Juvenal, who calls Isis a procuress and her shrine a

rendez-vous for adulterous and libidinous practices.

* * * * *

Among symbolic emblems that represented, in combination, the male and

female principles of generation and fecundity, were the Egyptian crux

ansata and the seal of Solomon.

* * * * *

The phallic symbol was so pervasive, so potent, in the lives of the

ancients, that the priapic function and the erotic variations of the

generative performance were pictorially represented in every conceivable

form of reproduction: scenes on vases representing perverted

consummations: baskets filled with phalli that were offered for sale to

yearning women: ithyphallic figures: monuments, lamps and other objects

depicting orgiastic lubricities.

* * * * *

In Ezekiel 16.17 there is a reference to the phallic figure: Fecisti

tibi imagines masculinas et fornicata es in eis.

* * * * *

In one of the bucolic Idyls of the Greek poet Theocritus (c. 310–c. 250

B.C.) the maiden Simaetha, in love with Delphis, who has abandoned her,

attempts to regain his love by performing certain magic rites and making

invocations to Selene, Aphrodite, and the horrendous Hecate.

She fashions a wax image of Delphis and by sympathetic magic anticipates

the melting of his heart in correspondence with the melting of the

image.

In addition, she makes use of the magic wheel, and her refrain

throughout the performance is:

My magic wheel, draw home to me

The man I love!

Intertwined with these rituals is the further refrain, addressed to

Selene, the moon goddess:

Bethink thee of my love,

And whence it came,

My Lady Moon!

* * * * *

In his _De Sanitate Tuenda Praecepta_, Advice on keeping Well, Plutarch,

the Greek philosopher and biographer, comments on lust and potions:

While we loathe and detest women who contrive philtres and magic to use

upon their husbands, we entrust our food and provisions to hirelings and

slaves to be all but bewitched and drugged. If the saying of Arcesilaus,

addressed to the adulterous and licentious, appears too bitter, to the

effect that ‘it makes no difference whether a man practices lewdness in

the front parlor or in the back hall,’ yet it is not without its

application to our subject. For in very truth, what difference does it

make whether a man employ aphrodisiacs to stir and excite licentiousness

for the purpose of pleasure or whether he stimulate his taste by odors

and sauces to require, like the itch, continual scratchings and

ticklings.

(Loeb)

* * * * *

In Greek mythology, Andromache, the wife of the Trojan warrior Hector,

was accused by Hermione, wife of Neoptolemus, of gaining his love by

means of love-potions. Euripides, the tragic poet (c. 485–406 B.C.),

refers to the situation in his drama _Andromache_:

Not of my philtres thy lord hateth thee,

But that thy nature is no mate for his.

That is the love-charm: woman, ’tis not beauty

That witcheth bridegrooms, nay, but nobleness.

* * * * *

Philtres were in actual use beyond mythological times. Xenophon (c.

430–354 B.C.), the Greek historian, author of _Memorabilia_, alludes to

the practice:

“They say,” replied Socrates, “that there are certain

incantations which those who know them chant to whomsoever they

please, and thus make them their friends; and that there are

also love potions which those who know them administer to whomso

they will; and are in consequence loved by them.”

* * * * *

Propertius, however, the Roman elegiac poet (c. 48 B.C.–16 B.C.), refers

to the futility of love potions:

Here herbs are of no avail,

nor nocturnal Cytaeis,

nor grasses brewed by the

hand of Perimede.

Cytaeis is the witch Medea: while Perimede is another witch, called by

Homer Agamede.

* * * * *

The Bacchic cult in Egypt is described by the Greek historian Herodotus

in Book 2 of his _History of the Persian Wars_:

To Bacchus, on the eve of his feast, every Egyptian sacrifices a

hog before the door of his house, which is then given back to

the swineherd by whom it was furnished, and by him carried away.

In other respects the festival is celebrated almost exactly as

Bacchic festivals are in Greece, excepting that the Egyptians

have no choral dances. They also use instead of phalli another

invention, consisting of images a cubit high, pulled by strings,

which the women carry round to the villages. A piper goes in

front, and the women follow, singing hymns in honor of Bacchus.

They give a religious reason for the peculiarities of the image.

* * * * *

In Book 5 of _The History of the Persian Wars_, Herodotus describes some

of the marital customs of the Thracians:

The Thracians who live above the Crestonaeans observe the

following customs. Each man among them has several wives; and no

sooner does a man die than a sharp contest ensues among the

wives upon the question, which of them all the husband loved

most tenderly; the friends of each eagerly plead on her behalf,

and she to whom the honor is adjudged, after receiving the

praises both of men and women, is slain over the grave by the

hand of her next of kin, and then buried with her husband. The

others are sorely grieved, for nothing is considered such a

disgrace.

The Thracians who do not belong to these tribes have the customs which

follow. They sell their children to traders. On their maidens they keep

no watch, but leave them altogether free, while on the conduct of their

wives they keep a most strict watch. Brides are purchased of their

parents for large sums of money.... The gods which they worship are but

three, Mars, Bacchus, and Dian.

* * * * *

An ancient Hittite text contains invocations and rituals intended to

remedy conditions of incapacity or lack of erotic desire.

A sacrifice is performed to Uliliyassis, continuing for three days. Food

is prepared: sacrificial loaves, grain, a pitcher of wine. The shirt of

the male suppliant is brought forth.

The suppliant bathes. He twines cords of red and of white wool. A sheep

is sacrificed. An invocation is made, beseeching help and favor: Come to

this man, the cry arises. Come down to this man. Make his wife conceive

and let him beget sons and daughters.

* * * * *

An Egyptian love song, belonging in the second millennium B.C., is still

extant. The love song was usually chanted to a musical accompaniment.

The lover is addressed as sister, or brother.

The heart is sick from love, laments the victim, and no physician, no

magician can heal this disease, except the appearance of the sister.

There is abundant reference to spices, to myrrh and incense, and the

tone of the amatory supplications and yearnings is the tone of the Song

of Songs. Listlessness on the part of the love-sick suppliant is

banished, as soon as he beholds his beloved, as soon as her arms open in

embrace.

* * * * *

In ancient orgiastic cults, particularly those dedicated to Dionysus and

to the Syrian Baal, religious frenzies were accompanied or stimulated by

drugs, fermented drink, by rhythmic dance movements, by tambourine,

drum, and flute music that culminated in ecstatic self-mutilation

followed by wild sexual debaucheries.

* * * * *

Passion, lust, incest, fornication, adultery, as well as concubinage and

polygamy, most of the sexual perversions and aberrations that are now

included under medico-psychiatric categories, occur in the Bible, in

both Testaments.

King David married eight women. On his flight from Absalom he left ten

concubines behind him. Jacob had two wives. King Solomon had seven

hundred wives and three hundred concubines.

There are instances of enduring affection too, as in the case of Jacob,

who labored for Rachel for fourteen years.

There is sudden, rapturous love at first sight, at all costs:

It happened, late one afternoon, when David arose from his couch

and was walking upon the roof of the king’s house, that he saw

from the roof a woman bathing, and the woman was very beautiful.

And David sent and inquired about the woman. And one said, “Is

not this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the

Hittite?”

So David sent messengers and took her, and he lay with her.

Amnon is overwhelmed by a passionate infatuation for his half sister

Tamar. He was so tormented that he made himself sick because of his

sister. He is advised by his friend Jonadab to go to bed and claim

illness. Tamar brings him food and at this point Amnon attempts

seduction. When she suggests an approach to the king, for permission to

marry Amnon, his lust overpowers him, and he consummates his passion.

After which, in a frenzy of hate, he banishes her.

The Song of Solomon is a paean to sexual love, an erotic exultation, the

apogee of amatory sensuality.

In the New Testament, too, there is frequent reference to harlots and

debauchees and to a variety of ‘sinners.’

* * * * *

Babylonian customs, in addition to the rites of temple prostitution,

included both male and female sacred concubines. There was considerable

pre-marital sexual freedom. But there was also monogamous marriage

involving rigid fidelity. Trial marriage was acknowledged. Adultery was

punished by drowning the guilty wife. In the degenerative days of

Babylon, morality broke down. Male prostitutes rouged their cheeks and

bedecked themselves with jewelry, while the poor exposed their daughters

to prostitution. Sensuality and erotic libertinage became dominant and

pervasive.

* * * * *

Among the Canaanites the most potent deities—Baal and El and

Asherah—were the symbols of procreation and sexuality. Hence, all acts,

all objects, all rituals associated with copulation, with the phallus,

with fecundity were divinely inspired and inherently sacred. Ceremonials

dedicated to the deities invariably included sexual activity, sacred and

ecstatic orgies. The voluptuous and sensual character of the dedicatory

rites was evidently so appealing that they lured the Israelites into

acceptance and imitation, for the deity of the Israelites was one,

supreme, without kin, without consort, without sexuality.

* * * * *

The New Testament attacks pagans, particularly Roman paganism, for

unnatural sexual practices, lusts, and corrupt and degenerate mores.

* * * * *

In primitive Greek society, under a primal matriarchy, the male

functioned as a kind of passive sexual partner, and virtually thereafter

as a domestic drudge.

But in the course of the centuries the male acquired dominance, in the

divine pantheon, and equally on a mortal and earthly plane, politically,

socially, and domestically.

But the concept of the inter-relationship of the sexes grew into a

concept of one primary harmonious principle of aesthetics, of essential

perfection of beauty, irrespective of sex and hence irrespective of any

compulsive admiration and appreciation of such beauty by one sex or the

other. Beauty became an entity in itself, a sexless trait. In the

Platonic dialogue, in fact, in the _Symposium_, the theory is postulated

that man was at one time androgynous.

The Greek hetaira or male companion was virtually a prostitute.

Sometimes she acquired a more permanent status, when she was bought by a

master and became a _pallakis_ or concubine.

Homosexuality, on the other hand, brought no stigma to the boys or young

men involved in the practice. Because homosexuality was a corollary,

applied in practice, of the primary concept of aesthetic beauty

irrespective of sex.

In the case of women, there was the corresponding though possibly not so

widespread cult of tribadism.

* * * * *

The Romans cultivated sexuality, particularly in a heterosexual

direction, with great vigor and lustfulness. It was largely through the

growing consciousness of Rome as an imperial power, and through the

increase in industry and commerce, in wealth and consequent luxury and

idleness, that perversions of all kinds increased and multiplied to such

an abnormal extent that in the first century A.D. the Romans themselves,

through their own poets, commented on the situation and contrasted it,

with some sense of nostalgia, with the severe and rigid and essentially

stabilized moral code that prevailed in the old pre-imperial days.

* * * * *

During the Roman Empire, with the increase of childless families, women

were able to give more scope to their femininity, their sexual appeal,

and their erotic allurements. As a consequence, there was an upsurge of

marital license, on the part of both husband and wife, but notoriously

so in the case of the women. This situation reached the most shameless

depths, as the poet Juvenal testifies: and as the Church Fathers later

on asserted, in their wholesale condemnations of pagan practices.

Early in the first century A.D. the insidious decline of domestic

morality became so manifest that imperial decrees required marriage in

the case of men under sixty and of women under fifty: and these

ordinances also restricted the freedoms of bachelorhood.

Marriage was thus officially encouraged, and large families were granted

special privileges and monetary awards from the imperial treasury. But

these and similar measures were abortive in their primary purpose. For

prostitution flourished and grew and became so flagrant and yet so

characteristically identified with later Roman society that there were

at least a score of designations for the public harlot, according to her

social status, her price, and her locale. Thus lust and eros were

rampantly triumphant.

Harlotry was manifestly rife in Old Testament days, for there is

repeated allusion to the practice: in the symbolism of Oholah and

Oholibah, in the Psalms and in the prophets, particularly Isaiah and

Jeremiah, in the Book of Judges, and in Samuel.

In addition, there is mention of the allurements of the harlot: her

chamber fragrant and enticing with spices and perfumes, aloes and myrrh

and cinnamon.

There is reference to the personal seductive persuasiveness of the

harlot’s coaxing words, the urgency of her erotic devices.

* * * * *

The Old Testament mentions and illustrates the morality involved in

sexual impulses resulting in physiological consummations. Under certain

circumstances, stoning the guilty pair was enjoined. In some cases, the

man only was punished, by death. In other situations the man who spurned

the woman after carnally knowing her was whipped and fined one hundred

shekels of silver. For fornication, the death penalty was normally

enforced. Sacred prostitution in the temple, too, whether affecting male

or female, was prohibited.

* * * * *

Homosexuality and sacred male prostitution are both known to the Bible.

In Deuteronomy there is an injunction against the sons of Israel

becoming sacred prostitutes. The abominations of Sodom receive ample

treatment. Even transvestism is prohibited, for it suggests sexual

dubiety, physiological ambiguity, and a possible merging of the sexes, a

potential elimination of the sexual demarcations. Other amatory

abnormalities also appear in Biblical contexts, among them: rape,

voyeurism, and bestiality.

* * * * *

With the onset of the Hellenistic Age, concurrent with Alexander the

Great’s death in 323 B.C., the Mysteries, the exclusive secretive cults,

advanced in importance and in the extent of their influence. Many of

these cults came from the East and merged, with adaptations and various

amplifications or modifications, into the Greek and Roman religious

sphere. The cult of Cybele, Magna Mater Deorum, the Mighty Mother of the

gods, was most dominant, transcending all other cults and to some degree

absorbing them. In addition, there were the cults of Sabazios, of

Mithras, of Isis and Osiris. These cults bound the initiates to close

secrecy: and thus only occasional fragments, hints, references from

various sources can present any degree of coherence and design in the

cults. It is known that there were dramatic presentations involving

communion with the deities, dark rites and ceremonials, even vague

adumbrations of the concept of immortality, as well as castigation and

castration, fertility symbolisms and seasonal fructifying cycles. There

were, further, the Gnostics, searchers for divine knowledge. Some of

these speculative cosmologists were scrupulously ascetic in every sense,

while others orgiastically indulged, toward the attainment of the same

end, in fleshly passions.

* * * * *

At the Greek celebration of the Phallophoria, leather or wooden

representations of the phallus were carried processionally through the

public streets of the polis. It was the thematic manifestation of

all-embracing fertility, on land, among the beasts of the fields, and in

human relationships. It was a kind of visual paean, in fact, to the

primal sexual impulse, to the basic erotic conflict.

* * * * *

One of the earliest instances of multiple incest occurs in Book 10 of

Homer’s _Odyssey_, in which Odysseus describes his visit to Aeolus.

Aeolus has a family of six daughters and six sons, and he has given his

daughters in marriage to his own sons.

* * * * *

In Greece the Aphrodision, and in Rome the Venereum, were the private

bordellos that were not used by the general indiscriminate public.

* * * * *

Both in antiquity and in later ages the public baths, with both sexes in

nude contacts in the _balnea mixta_, were a direct amatory stimulant. As

further provocatives, there was, in particular cases, bathing in asses’

milk, in essences of myrtle and lavender, in rose water, in almond paste

and in honey water, and also in champagne.

* * * * *

In Greece, the phallus was so pervasive as a genesiac symbol in every

phase of daily life, that there were loaves baked in phallic form. These

loaves were known, for another erotic reason, as olisbokolices.

* * * * *

Drillopotae were glass vessels in phallic form. They were used, in

ancient Rome, as drinking cups: and thus were an added erotic reminder

at banquets and similar gatherings.

* * * * *

In Roman antiquity the color yellow was associated with prostitutes, and

was a symbol of their profession. Yellow still retained this

significance in the Central European countries in later ages. In Tsarist

Russia, the yellow ticket was the official prostitute’s occupational

token. Alexander Kuprin’s _Yama the Pit_ describes the situation in a

vivid and grim narrative.

* * * * *

Figurae Veneris is a Latin expression meaning _positions of Venus_. This

phrase refers to the range of sexual positions. The Greeks were familiar

with some seventy such permutations and manipulations. There were the

symplegma and the catena, which involved more than two partners, and the

dodekamechanon. Hesychius the Greek lexicographer, Philaenis, and, among

the Romans, the poet Martial mention these contortions. In the Middle

Ages, the licentious poet Pietro Aretino produced a poetic commentary on

the entire extent of erotic possibilities.

Among periapts and amulets that were credited with promoting erotic

activity were charms in the shape of an extended hand, a wild boar, the

head of a bull, astrological signs; magic formulas too, inscribed on

various objects; the crux ansata, and genitalia.

* * * * *

Among erotic pieces that are no longer extant are certain elegiac poems,

of an amatory type, attributed formerly to Plato the philosopher. An

ancient Roman poet named Laevius wrote an erotopaegnion. Apuleius, the

Roman philosopher and novelist, produced a number of amatory epigrams.

These references, together with others that include Vergil’s _Aeneid_

and the _Georgics_, are made by the Roman poet Ausonius himself.

He adds, also, that, like Martial and other poets, his life is

unblemished though his verses may be dubious:

Igitur cui hic ludus noster non placet, ne legerit: aut cum

legerit, obliviscatur: aut non oblitus, ignoscat.

* * * * *

Phallic priests were called phallobatai. Not only Priapus, but other

deities as well in ancient Greece, were worshipped with erotic fervor.

Among these were Phanes, Lordon, and Orthanes.

* * * * *

[Illustration:

Metropolitan Museum of Art

LOVE AND PSYCHE

_by Rodin_

]

[Illustration:

Philadelphia Museum of Art

THE ABDUCTOR

_by Rodin_

]

Philodemus of Gadara, who flourished in the first century B.C., was a

Greek poet who settled in Rome. He became an intimate of powerful

political forces, and also gathered around him a coterie of Romans

interested in philosophy and literature. Among other works, mostly of a

philosophical nature, Philodemus produced erotic pieces marked by

extreme lewdness. Some twenty-five of these epigrams are still extant,

collected in the corpus known as the _Anthologia Palatina_. These poems

became popular in Rome and were imitated by both Horace and Ovid.

* * * * *

As an erotic stimulus, Greek women wore diaphanous thin-spun robes made

of silk from the island of Cos. In Rome, similarly, prostitutes

sometimes wore a toga vitrea—a glassy or transparent toga. There were,

too, vestes sericae—silk dresses, in feminine use.

All such robes, of course, were of a purposely revealing and tantalizing

nature, acting upon the viewer in a marked amatory direction. Seneca,

the Roman Stoic philosopher, makes blunt and condemnatory remarks on the

custom.

* * * * *

In Athens, there was an old quarter of the city dedicated to

prostitution of the lowest type. This area was known as the Ceramicus.

* * * * *

The agents who acted as intermediaries, as panders and procurers and

enticers in the furtive sexual commerce, in the seamy undercurrents of

ancient life, were known under various descriptive designations. In

Greece, there were the maulis and the draxon, the karbis and the

proagogos, the mastropos, the prokyklis and the nymphagogos and the

pornoboscos. Romans had their own counterparts: the professional

procurer, the leno, the mercator meretricius, the admissarius and the

institor, the lenonum minister, the perductor and the conductor: and,

among the female operatives, the agaga and the stimulatrix, the

conciliatrix and the stupri sequestra.

* * * * *

Phallic symbols enter into the Biblical context in I Kings, where Judah

is described as building high places and pillars on every high hill.

These pillars were actually phallic symbols, in the style of the

abominations of the Canaanite cults.

* * * * *

In antiquity, in Biblical and post-Biblical times, the woman, in the

widest sense, was the amatory slave of man. But with the woman’s

increase of knowledge in erotic skills and practices, in the secrets of

her potent physiological attractions, in the use of unguents and

cosmetics, potions and concoctions, in corporeal and mechanistic

allurements and seductions, the woman’s status gradually rose and

extended and became all-embracing. Slowly, by virtue of these very

artifices and techniques, by means of gyrations and gestures,

provocative dances and tantalizing dress, silent invitations and ocular

speech, she began to dominate man, to render him subservient and even

obsequious, to control his habits and inclinations and tendencies in

social and political directions: until woman, reaching the apogee of her

power, based primarily on her erotic compulsiveness, became the woman

behind the throne. She had attained her highest end, her ultimate

destiny, as the implicit director of human activities. She usurped man’s

status, and assumed the regal baton. She manipulated kings and sultans,

and her endearments were bought at the price of nations. She decided the

fate of empires by her mere brusque whims, or personal resentment, her

unpredictable likes. Man exchanged realms and justice for her amatory

acquiescence, her erotic beneficence.

* * * * *

In a formal religious-ceremonial sense, antiquity acknowledged

participation of women in the sacred temples. In Asia Minor, in the

cults of Baal-Peor, in the Egyptian cults of Isis and Osiris, in the

Mediterranean Hellenic islands where the cult of Aphrodite in various

forms and of analogous deities of passion and lust and procreation was

prevalent, in the case of the Vestal guardians of the Roman state

religion, priestesses took part in the hieratic rituals, in festive

ceremonials, in sacrificial and processional rites.

Even with the advent of Christianity the Greek church in the East had

its female votaries, while deaconesses were normally attached to the

Church in the West. In the course of time, however, this acquiescence in

a female priesthood turned into resentment, into hate, and finally into

bitter and continuous official condemnation. Woman became the evil

daemon, the essence of every malefic, licentious, forbidden, obscene

practice, the sink of turpitude, the scourge of men, the destruction of

humanity. Thus many early Fathers of the Church, Tertullian and Arnobius

and Clement of Alexandria, inveigh against the serpentine machinations

of woman. Hence this view and these attitudes were transmitted into the

Middle Ages. In these middle centuries woman is depicted as the ally of

Satanic forces, powerful on account of her very femininity, her presumed

innocent frailty. She is essentially guileful and treacherous, amoral

and immoral, and bent on the spiritual subjugation and desecration of

perplexed man. Woman became the symbol of all sin, the prototype of

every sacrilegious concept. She was stripped of a soul. She was in

league with the demoniac tenebrous forces, the Satanic legions that

furtively and thaumaturgically work their evil spells on man. She

became, in short, the Anti-Christ incarnate, the Abominable Witch,

consort of horned and hoofed Satan. And her attractions, her feminine

beauty, were merely distorted and insidious forms of her fundamental

iniquities.

* * * * *

Woman was conceived as attaining her sanguinary or lustful purposes by

means of feminine stratagems or conspiratorial schemes, by personal

ruthlessness that swept aside all frustrations, all moralities, and

stopped neither at poisoning nor at murder. The roster of such women, in

the stream of universal history, is long and challenging. It includes,

among many others equally notorious, equally branded, Lilith and

Cleopatra, Claudia and Messalina, Antonina and Theodora, Catherine of

Russia and Elizabeth Bathory, Madame de Montespan and Lady Kyteler, the

Borgias and Isobel Gowdie, Jeannette Biscar: and, in goetic contexts,

Sagana, Canidia, and Oenothea.

* * * * *

Aphrodite had many forms, multiple aspects of her functions and her

patronage, numberless descriptive designations, both in Greece itself

and in the cults of Asia Minor where her attributes were equated with

the properties of analogous and indigenous divinities. But basically she

was one, the universal, the cosmic force that dominates all amatory

contacts, that drives men, intent votaries of the goddess and bent on

adherent dedication to her offices, to the realization of her

injunctions at all costs, resorting to charms and mystic recipes, to

fantastic interpretations of precious stones and flowers, to talismans

and amatory manuals, grimoires, exotic herbs and insidious preparations.

* * * * *

For centuries man and woman have displayed mutual hostilities and

resentments in a number of directions: personally and socially,

politically and spiritually. Yet there appears a strange dichotomy in

this human pair of male and female. They have despised each other and

have sought each other, as Plato suggests in one of his more fanciful

moments. The mutual act of racial procreation merged and was

subsequently largely lost in the erotic consummations itself. So that,

as the complexities of life grew, and as its manifestations multiplied

and offered man a variety of experiences, motifs, recreational

facilities and diversions, the woman as such came into her own, and

Aphrodite established her sacred and profane sanctuaries at the

crossroads, in sundered islands of the Aegean Sea, on the highways, in

luxurious retreats, and in rural fastnesses. And, casting aside all

spiritualities in man’s search for a teleological significance to

existence, made Eros the alpha and omega, the final purpose, of cosmic

being.

* * * * *

Initiation into the cult of Aphrodite was known by the Greek expression

mysterion: the mystery. The participants, the mystai, after bathing in

the sea—and the sea itself was symbolic, for it was the source of

Aphrodite’s own birth—, they assembled in the evening in the Mystery

Hall. Torches were lit, casting flitting shadows and tenebrous shapes

through the chamber.

Then the ritual began. There were recitals by the initiates. Sacred

objects were shown to the awed gathering, as well as certain phenomena

about which too little knowledge has been transmitted. Then some kinds

of performances were presented, all associated with the portentous

relation between mortals, striving toward passionate intimacy with the

divinity, and the puissant deity herself.

Three degrees of initiation were in force: the first initiate approach:

the preliminary stage: and the highest rites. This final ritual, it is

believed, brought into communion the adept and the deity. Erotic and

sexual symbols were dominant factors in this ceremonial.

In this mystic cult of the goddess, the hierodule, the courtesan, is the

intermediary between the suppliant and the divinity. She is the sexual

passport, so to speak, that leads to the more secretive ritual of the

Aphroditic temple.

There is, in the course of this rite, the necessity for a purgation, a

purification by water. There is a reference to such an initiation in the

Roman poet Juvenal’s second satire. He speaks of a mystic sect called

the Baptae. This expression derives from the Greek baptizo, dipping in

water. The Baptae drank, as an element in their ritual, powerful liquids

from phallus-shaped vessels. These Baptae were devotees of Cotytto, an

obscene and salacious goddess.

Women were not admitted to the Aphroditic rites: but, strangely, the men

came robed as women, painted and powdered and reeking in exotic

perfumes. Subsequently, they dedicated themselves to every form of

sexual subtlety.

In another more advanced stage of initiation, where physical love became

sublimated, Aphrodite was in this phase the Syrian goddess Derceto or

Atargatis: the half woman, half fish deity. Basically she was a

fertility goddess, sometimes called Dea Syria, the Syrian goddess, the

universal divinity. Her cult is described by the Greek writer Lucian:

and Apuleius, the Roman philosopher and novelist, speaks about her

priests, the wandering Galli:

How the Priests of the Goddesse Siria Were Taken and Put in

Prison.

After that we had tarried there a few dayes at the cost and charges of

the whole Village, and had gotten much mony by our divination and

prognostication of things to come: The priests of the goddesse Siria

invented a new meanes to picke mens purses, for they had certaine lofts,

whereon were written: Coniuncti terram proscindunt boves ut in futurum

laeta germinent sata: that is to say. The Oxen tied and yoked together,

doe till the ground to the intent it may bring forth his increase: and

by these kind of lottes they deceive many of the simple sort, for if one

had demanded whether he should have a good wife or no, they would say

that his lot did testifie the same, that he should be tyed and yoked to

a good woman and have increase of children. If one demanded whether he

should buy lands and possession, they said that he should have much

ground that should yeeld his increase. If one demanded whether he should

have a good and prosperous voyage, they said he should have good

successe, and it should be for the increase of his profit. If one

demanded whether hee should vanquish his enemies, and prevaile in

pursuite of theeves, they said that this enemy should be tyed and yoked

to him: and his pursuite after theeves should be prosperous. Thus by the

telling of fortunes, they gathered a great quantity of money, but when

they were weary with giving of answers, they drave me away before them

next night, through a lane which was more dangerous and stony then the

way which we went the night before, for on the one side were quagmires

and foggy marshes, on the other side were falling trenches and ditches,

whereby my legges failed me, in such sort that I could scarce come to

the plaine field pathes. And behold by and by a great company of

inhabitants of the towne armed with weapons and on horseback overtooke

us, and incontinently arresting Philebus and his Priests, tied them by

the necks and beate them cruelly, calling them theeves and robbers, and

after they had manacled their hands: Shew us (quoth they) the cup of

gold, which (under the colour of your solemne religion) ye have taken

away, and now ye thinke to escape in the night without punishment for

your fact. By and by one came towards me, and thrusting his hand into

the bosome of the goddesse Siria, brought out the cup which they had

stole. Howbeit for all they appeared evident and plaine they would not

be confounded nor abashed, but jesting and laughing out the matter, gan

say: Is it reason masters that you should thus rigorously intreat us,

and threaten for a small trifling cup, which the mother of the Goddesse

determined to give to her sister for a present? Howbeit for all their

lyes and cavellations, they were carryed back unto the towne, and put in

prison by the Inhabitants, who taking the cup of gold, and the goddesse

which I bare, did put and consecrate them amongst the treasure of the

temple.

* * * * *

Aphrodite exacted from her devotees certain prescribed ceremonies,

testimonies to their communion with the goddess, palpable evidences of

their total mystic and spiritual absorption in the sacraments she

demanded of her votaries.

The ritual followed an established design. At sunset the catechumen is

conducted to the temple. Then, facing the East, the priest raises his

left hand skyward and with his right he seizes a bronze knife, plunges

it into boiling water, and then performs the ritual sexual rite with

respect to the catechumen.

Then followed solemn and hieratic instruction in the amatory procedures,

including the methods of arousing erotic sensibilities, provocative

postures and gestures, words and formulas, osculation and its pervasive

corporeal significance. There were, furthermore, illustrative

consummations, considered without lewdness, but accepted as formal

elements in the grave cosmic scheme. There was a musical accompaniment

that softly intertwined in the sequence of the various rituals and

presentations, a kind of amatory, seductive litany, enfolding the entire

ceremonial in a sacred aura of mysticism. In the concluding phase of

these rites, there appeared the phallic procession, the symbolic

glorification of the creative urge, and the actual illustration of this

potency culminated in an abandoned sexual orgy, indiscriminate and

incestuous, exultant and fleshly, carnal and spiritual in one fervid

syncretism. A concomitant of this vast sensual exhibition, this release

of the physical carapace, was prostitution itself, which for long

retained a ritualistic character.

The next step in this genesiac process was sacred prostitution, whereby

the woman symbolized the solemnity and the compulsiveness of the

Aphroditic cult, while the man was the visitant, a suppliant for the

favor of the divinity. And the hierodule thus was a kind of prototype,

associated with wise skills, a vestal of the goddess, initiating men

into secret amatory and sacred rituals: an adept too in concocting love

philtres to further genesiac exultation, to induce total participation

in a sort of Aphroditic gnosticism.

* * * * *

The Aphroditic injunction embraced, in a sense, the entire cosmos. It

involved primarily self-love, love of being, awareness of the

significant entity, the ego itself, marked by dignity, by esteem. Then

followed the love of the social milieu of which one formed part, and of

the impulse to maintain its equilibrium by contributing one’s own

efforts, one’s personal function, to the totality of the social frame.

Lastly, there was a kind of all-embracing, comprehensive cosmic love,

directed to a synthesis of corporeal love that mystically rose to a

sublimated spiritual-amatory zone.

* * * * *

In the mystic cults, it was postulated that the amatory embrace partakes

of both a human and a cosmic form of attraction, and becomes, in a

sublimated degree, an act of prayer, an erotic supplication.

* * * * *

The priapic cult was the male counterpart of the Aphroditic cult. Just

as the hierodule was the official priestess of the goddess, mentor in

the feminine erotic and reverential mysteries, so the priapic cult had

for its primary objective the exaltation of the male generative

principle. In remote antiquity, and particularly in Egyptian mysticism,

the phallus was the representative symbol of Osiris, the ultimate

creative potency. Gradually, in the course of the centuries, the phallic

symbol acquired a pejorative and degrading and exclusively and narrowly

functional nature associated with the mere physical act. And Priapus,

equated at one time with Osiris, degenerated into a secondary and minor

figure, a mere rustic threat. Yet Priapus retained some semblance of his

former repute. He still had his temple and his priestly ministrants. He

still received favors and offerings. He still made promises to his

devotees and listened to their urgent amatory pleas. He still maintained

his sexual rituals, however much they had lost their spiritual and

cosmic values. He still presided, in the actuality of performance, over

marriage initiations, over nuptial consummations. But with time he

disappeared as a member of the mystery cults. And only in vestiges of

legend, in old rites transmitted into the Middle Ages, in sculptural

presentations, in phallic symbolisms, did his former magnificence and

his primary rank retain any fragmentary reminiscence of his vanished

glories.

In the smaller towns of Italy festive occasions in honor of Priapus were

perpetuated until far into the Middle Ages; and Priapus, in some

instances, particularly in Brittany, in Belgium, and in France, merged

with Christian saints, who appropriated, in their turn, the genesiac

properties of their prototype.

In rural districts, shrines dedicated to Priapus defied the spread of

Christianity, while phallic forms, in marble and stone, adorned public

buildings, baths, columns, churches. Priapus, to some extent, thus went

underground. He became a furtive and then an obsolescent and forgotten

figure: but in Switzerland and in Sweden, in Provence and in Germany,

Priapus clung tenaciously, if only in an etymological sense. For Friday,

Friga’s day, is merely a Teutonic or Anglo-Saxon form of the Day of

Priapus.

Strange how the antique charms and periapts, the old Roman fascina, were

still suspended from the necks of children and women: often without any

awareness of the actual significance of the talisman, but just as

frequently, until late into the fourteenth century at least,

ecclesiastical ordinances and prohibitions made it evident that there

was official knowledge of the priapic survival.

* * * * *

Among the ancient Chaldeans, Assyrians, and Babylonians, the erotic cult

was dedicated to the fertility deities Ishtar and Bel and Sin. Ishtar

was the Mesopotamian Aphrodite: a goddess of love and at the same time a

warrior deity. Bel is Baal-Peor, the phallic deity, while Sin is the

moon divinity.

* * * * *

Aphrodite, as a universal goddess, with universal erotic functions that

embrace all humanity, all elements of the cosmos, appears in different

regions and centuries under a variety of names. She is Aphrodite

Callipygos and she is Aphrodite Anosia: Aphrodite Peribaso and Aphrodite

Anadyomene and Aphrodite Hetaira. Sometimes she is designated with

reference to her beauty, or to her amatory functions, or to her

epichorial association with temple worship dedicated to her person, or

to the suppliants whom she intimately protects. She is thus Aphrodite

Pandemos and Aphrodite Porne. She is Aphrodite Trymalitis and Aphrodite

Stratonikis. She is Aphrodite Pontia and Aphrodite Urania.

Then she becomes, retaining her essential character but merely

transferring her rituals, Venus Fisica and Venus Caelesiis and Venus

Erycian. She is the Cytherean and the Paphian, she is the Cyprian

divinity.

She is known, again, as Anaïtis and as Astoreth. She is Allat and

Argimpasa and Atargatis. In later ages she is Milda in Eastern Europe

and Merta and Freya in the North.

But under whatever designation she appears, in Arabia or Scythia, in the

Greek Islands or in Carthage, she is fertility incarnate and love. She

is the alma Venus genetrix that the Roman poet Lucretius reverently

invokes.

* * * * *

Through the ages the concept of generation has undergone progressively

definitive changes. In proto-historical times, when legend and myth,

mingling with supernatural fantasies, conceived imaginative unrealities

in relation to the medical and physiological facts, the ancient Hindu

epics assumed man as sprung from the forests, from aspen and ash trees,

sylvan creatures, in some sense, corresponding to the half-human form of

the ancient Hellenic satyrs. In some regions of India there was a belief

that the produce of certain trees was human beings, male and female, and

that the mortals fell upon the earth like ripe fruit. Among the Persians

and contiguous races of antiquity, pregnant women were given soma juice

to drink, to ensure handsome children. Soma is an intoxicating brew that

is often mentioned in Vedic religious rituals. According to Pliny the

Elder’s testimony, water in which mistletoe has been steeped encourages

procreation in women and animals.

The oak tree and the chestnut also have been reputed to aid in

procreation. So with plants too, that have at all times been treated as

potential and actual amatory aids. An African legend makes a girl, after

drinking the juice of a certain plant, give birth to a mighty warrior.

The chewing of lilies was considered conducive to fertility, in medieval

folklore. So, in still earlier times, with the pomegranate and the

almond. In many cases, the belief arose from the similarity of the plant

or flower or herb, in certain respects, to the genitalia or the pudenda.

This was so in the case of the bean. So with mandrake, and cress, and

certain species of berries.

* * * * *

Another legendary mode of conception, prevalent in ancient classical and

Oriental mythology, was theriomorphic theogamy: that is, generation by a

divinity who assumes animal form.

Instances are multiple. Zeus, in the shape of a bull, pursues Europa in

cow form. In Egypt, Apis the bull has a similar function. The seductive

serpent, again, is Zeus once more, exercising his protean capacity. On

occasion, he becomes a swan, and associates with Leda. Or he becomes a

variety of creatures: an ant, or a dove, or a goat, or an ass. Once,

Neptune, for a similar purpose, turned into a ram.

Sometimes, also, the divine serpent, sinuous and wily and knowledgeable,

is actually devoured by the woman, as in Arab regions.

Not only animals and plants were associated with generative capacities,

but natural phenomena as well: the winds and storms, hail and the sun

and the rain. Some primitive tribes attributed their origin to snow:

some to lightning, or to thunder, to the rainbow, to clouds, to the

morning star. A warm breeze, or a cyclone might equally well have been

their source. Greek, Roman, and Chinese myths contain numberless

illustrations of astral or phenomenal association with mortal

generation.

There is a wry anecdote on this phase in Flavius Josephus, the

historian. An ingenious suitor performs the function of the deity Anubis

with complete faithful acceptance.

This type of mortal substitution in place of the divinity was common in

the priestly rituals of Egypt, and was not unknown in Asia Minor, in

India, and in China.

* * * * *

Periapts or talismans as an erotic provocation were anciently devised in

phallic form. They were carried on the person, by both men and women, or

were used to decorate temples and shrines and public buildings.

In later ages, amatory talismans assumed a great variety of forms, in

the shape of rings, necklaces, plaques engraved with formulas or

astrological figures and signs of the Zodiac or possibly a bull, a dove,

a number or a series of mystic numbers. A piece of parchment might be

inscribed with names, or the alphabetical sign of Venus. Precious stones

were talismans, each possessing an esoteric virtue or property according

to color or substance. A periapt might be set in some strategic spot:

buried underground, placed under a pillow: or even ground into a powder.

The all-powerful goddess herself, Venus, had her own minerals. Copper,

associated with the love goddess, was known to the Greeks as aphrodon.

Tin also was of Aphroditic significance: while sulphur springs were

also, in a legendary sense, related to Venus.

It has even been credited that floral nomenclature contains amatory

significance, and that certain plants have their erotic symbolisms.

* * * * *

Flowers in antiquity as well as in modern times had their erotic

implications. To the Greeks and Romans, the essence of _areté_, of

beauty and perfection, was the rose, while the Egyptians too revered the

rose as the prototype of perfection.

To Aphrodite were consecrated the mistletoe and myrtle, the lily,

satyrion, the iris, celandine, sengreen, mallow, and verbena.