Produced by Bryan Ness and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was
produced from scanned images of public domain material
from the Google Print project.)
By Mr. Saltus
MARY MAGDALEN
THE POMPS OF SATAN
IMPERIAL PURPLE
THE ANATOMY OF NEGATION
THE PERFUME OF EROS
VANITY SQUARE
HISTORIA AMORIS
_A History of Love
Ancient and Modern_
_By_
EDGAR SALTUS
NEW YORK
MITCHELL KENNERLEY
MCMVI
_Copyright 1906
By EDGAR SALTUS_
HISTORIA AMORIS
PART ONE
I Super Flumina Babylonis 1
II The Curtains of Solomon 10
III Aphrodite Urania 28
IV Sappho 41
V The Age of Aspasia 53
VI The Banquet 65
VII Roma-Amor 75
VIII Antony and Cleopatra 87
IX The Imperial Orgy 97
X Finis Amoris 110
PART TWO
I The Cloister and the Heart 125
II The Pursuivants of Love 138
III The Parliaments of Joy 150
IV The Doctors of the Gay Science 164
V The Apotheosis 177
VI Bluebeard 191
VII The Renaissance 198
VIII Love in the Seventeenth Century 213
IX Love in the Eighteenth Century 237
X The Law of Attraction 251
HISTORIA AMORIS
_Part One_
PART I
I
SUPER FLUMINA BABYLONIS
The first created thing was light. Then life came, then death. In between
was fear. But not love. Love was absent. In Eden there was none. Adam and
Eve emerged there adult. The phases of the delicate fever which others in
paradise since have experienced, left them unaffected. Instead of the
reluctances and attractions, the hesitancies and aspirations, the
preliminary and common conflagrations which are the beginnings, as they
are also the sacraments, of love, abruptly they were one. They were
married before they were mated.
The union, entirely allegoric--a Persian conceit--differed, otherwise,
only in the poetry of the accessories from that which elsewhere actually
occurred.
Primitive man was necessarily speechless, probably simian, and certainly
hideous. Women, if possible more hideous still, were joined by him
momentarily and immediately forgot. Ultimately, into the desolate poverty
of the rudimentary brain there crept a novelty. The novelty was an idea.
Women were detained, kept in lairs, made to serve there. Further novelties
ensuing, creatures that had learned from birds to talk passed from
animality. Subsequent progress originated in a theory that they were very
clearly entitled to whatever was not taken away from them. From that
theory all institutions proceed, primarily that of family.
In the beginning of things woman was common property. With individual
ownership came the necessity of defence. Man defended woman against even
herself. He beat her, stoned her, killed her. From the massacre of
myriads, constancy resulted. With it came the home: a hut in a forest, a
fort on a hill, in the desert a tent, yet, wherever situated, surrounded
by foes. The foes were the elements. In the thunderclap was their anger.
In the rustle of leaves their threats. They were placatable, however. They
could be appeased, as human beings are, by giving them something. Usually
the gift was the sacrifice of whatever the owner cared for most; in later
days it was love, pleasure, sense, but in these simpler times, when
humanity knew nothing of pleasure, less of love, and had no sense, when
the dominant sensation was fright, when every object had its spectre, it
was accomplished by the immolation of whatever the individual would have
liked to have had given to him. As intelligence developed, distinctions
necessarily arose between the animate and the inanimate, the imaginary and
the real. Instead of attributing a malignant spirit to every element, the
forces of nature were conglomerated, the earth became an object of
worship, the sun another, that being insufficient they were united in
nuptials from which the gods were born--demons from whom descended kings
that were sons of heaven and sovereigns of the world.
In the process, man, who had begun by being a brute, succeeded in becoming
a lunatic only to develop into a child. The latter evolution was, at the
time, remote. Only lunatics abounded. But lunatics may dream. These did.
Their conceptions produced after-effects curiously profound, widely
disseminated, which, first elaborated by Chaldaean seers, Nineveh emptied
into Babylon.
Babylon, Queen of the Orient, beckoned by Semiramis out of myth, was made
by her after her image. That image was passion. The city, equivocal and
immense, brilliant as the sun, a lighthouse in the surrounding night, was
a bazaar of beauty. From the upper reaches of the Euphrates, through great
gates that were never closed, Armenia poured her wines where already
Nineveh had emptied her rites. In the conjunction were festivals that
magnetized the stranger from afar. At the very gates Babylon yielded to
him her daughters. He might be a herder, a bedouin, a bondman;
indifferently the voluptuous city embraced him, lulled him with the myrrh
and cassia of her caresses, sheltering him and all others that came in the
folds of her monstrous robe.
In emptying rites into this furnace Nineveh also projected her gods, the
princes of the Chaldaean sky, the lords of the ghostland, that, in patient
perversities, her seers had devised. Four thousand of them Babylon
swallowed, digested, reproduced. Some were nebulous, some were saurian,
many were horrible, all were impure. But, chiefly, there was Ishtar.
Semiramis conquered the world. Ishtar set it on fire.
Ishtar, whom St. Jerome generically and graphically described as the Dea
Meretrix, was known in Babylon as Mylitta. Gesenius, Schrader, Muenter,
particularly Quinet, have told of the mysteries, Asiatically monstrous,
naively displayed, through which she passed, firing the trade routes with
the flame of her face, adding Tyrian purple and Arabian perfumes to her
incandescent robe, trailing it from shore to shore, enveloping kingdoms
and satrapies in her fervid embrace, burning them with the fever of her
kisses, burning them so thoroughly, to such ashes, that to-day barely the
memory of their names endures; multiplying herself meanwhile, lingering
there where she had seemed to pass, developing from a goddess into a
pantheon, becoming Astarte in Syria, Tanit in Carthage, Ashtaroth in
Canaan, Anaitis in Armenia, yet remaining always love, or, more exactly,
what was love in those days.
In Babylon, fronting her temple was a grove in which were dove-cotes,
cisterns, conical stones--the emblems of her worship. Beyond were little
tents before which girls sat, chapleted with cords, burning bran for
perfume, awaiting the will of the first that put a coin in their lap and
in the name of the goddess invited them to her rites. Acceptance was
obligatory. It was obligatory on all women to stop in the grove at least
once. Herodotus, from whom these details are taken, said that the sojourn
of those that were fair was brief, but others less favored lingered
vainly, insulted by the former as they left.[1]
Herodotus is father of history; perhaps too, father of lies. But later
Strabo substantiated his story. There is anterior evidence in the Bible.
There is antecedent testimony on a Nineveh brick. There is the further
corroboration of Justinus, of St. Augustin, and of Eusebius regarding
similar rites in Armenia, in Phoenicia, in Syria, wherever Ishtar
passed.[2]
The forms of the ceremony and the duration of it varied, but the worship,
always the same, was identical with that of the Hindu bayaderes, the
Kama-dasi, literally servants of love, more exactly servants of lust, who,
for hire, yielded themselves to any comer, and whose dishonorarium the
clergy took.
From Phoenicia the worship passed to Greece. Among local articles of
commerce were girls with whom the Phoenicians furnished harems. One of
their agencies was at Cythera. From the adjacent waters Venus was rumored
to have emerged. The rumor had truth for basis. But the emergence occurred
in the form of a stone brought there on a Phoenician galley. The fact,
cited by Maximus Tyrius, numismatics confirm. On the old coins of Paphos
it was as a stone that Venus appeared, a stone emblematic and phallic,
similar to those that stood in the Babylon grove.
Venus was even otherwise Phoenician. In Semitic speech girls were called
_benoth_, and at Carthage the tents in which the worship occurred were
termed _succoth benoth_. In old texts B was frequently changed to V. From
benoth came venoth and the final theta being pronounced, as was customary,
like sigma, venos resulted and so appears on a Roman medal, that of Julia
Augusta, wife of Septimius Severus, where Venus is written Venos.
Meanwhile on the banks of the Indus the stone reappeared. Posterior to the
Vedic hymns, it is not mentioned in them. Instead is the revelation of a
being purer than purity, excelling excellence, dwelling apart from life,
apart from death, ineffably in the solitudes of space. He alone was. The
gods were not yet. They, the earth, the sky, the forms of matter and of
man, slept in the depths of the ideal, from which at his will they arose.
That will was love. The _Mahabharata_ is its history.
There, succeeding the clamor of primal life, come the songs of shepherds,
the footfall of apsaras, the murmur of rhapsodies, of kisses and harps.
The pages turn to them. Then follow eremites in their hermitages, rajahs
in their palaces, chiefs in their chariots, armies of elephants and men,
seas of blood, gorgeous pomps, gigantic flowers, marvels and enchantments.
Above, on thrones of lotos and gold, are the serene and apathetic gods,
limitless in power, complete in perfection, unalterable in felicity,
needing nothing, having all. Evil may not approach them. Nonexistent in
infinity, evil is circumscribed within the halls of time. The appanage of
the gods was love, its revelation light.
That light must have been too pure. Subsequent theology decomposed it. In
its stead was provided a glare intolerably crude that disclosed divinities
approachable in deliriums of disorder, in unions from which reason had
fled, to which love could not come, and on which, in a sort of radiant
imbecility, idols semi-Chaldaean, polycephalous, hundred-armed, obese,
monstrous, revolting, stared with unseeing eyes.
In the Vedas there is much that is absurd and more that is puerile. The
_Mahabharata_ is a fairy-tale, interminable and very dull. But in none of
these works is there any sanction of the pretensions of a priesthood to
degrade. It was in the name of waters that slake, of fire that purifies,
of air that regenerates, of gods dwelling not in images but in infinity,
that love was invoked. It was in poetry, not in perversions, that marriage
occurred. In the Laws of Manu marriage is defined as the union of
celestial musicians,--music then as now being regarded as the food of
love.
The Buddhist Scriptures contain passages that were said to charm the birds
and beasts. In the Vedas there are passages which, if a soudra overheard,
the ignominy of his caste was abolished. The poetry that resided in them,
a poetry often childish, but primal, preceding the Pentateuch, purer than
it, chronologically anterior to Chaldaean aberrations, Brahmanism deformed
into rites that sanctified vice and did so, on a theory common to many
faiths, that the gods demand the surrender of whatever is most dear, if it
be love that must be sacrificed, if it be decency that must be renounced.
The latter refinement which Chaldaea invented, and India retained, Judaea
reviled.
II
THE CURTAINS OF SOLOMON
In the deluge women must have been swept wholly away. If not, then they
became beings to whom genealogy was indifferent. The long list of Noah's
descendants, which Genesis provides, contains no mention of them. When
ultimately they reappear, their consistency is that of silhouettes. It is
as though they belonged to an inferior order. Historically they did.
Woman was not honored in Judaea. The patriarch was chieftain and priest.
His tent was visited by angels, occasionally by creatures less beatific.
In spite of the terrible pomps that surrounded the advent of the
decalogue, there subsisted for his eternal temptation the furnace of
Moloch and Baal's orgiastic nights. These things--in themselves
corruptions of Chaldaean ceremonies--woman personified. Woman incarnated
sin. It was she who had invented it. To Ecclesiasticus, the evil of man
excelled her virtue. To Moses, she was dangerously impure. In Leviticus,
her very birth was a shame. To Solomon, she was more bitter than death. As
a consequence, the attitude of woman generally was as elegiac as that of
Jephthah's daughter. When she appeared it was but to vanish. In betrothals
there was but a bridegroom that asked and a father that gave. The bride
was absent or silent. As a consequence, also, the heroine was rare. Of the
great nations of antiquity, Israel produced fewer notable women than any
other. Yet, that, it may be, was by way of precaution, in order to reserve
the strength of a people for the presentation of one who, transcending
all, was to reign in heaven to the genuflections of the earth.
Meanwhile, conjointly with Baal and Moloch, Ishtar--known locally as
Ashtaroth--circumadjacently ruled. At a period when these abstractions
were omnipresent, when their temples were thronged, when their empires
seemed built for all time, the Hebrew prophets, who continuously reviled
them, foretold that they would pass and with them the gods, dogmas, states
that they sustained. So promptly were the prophecies fulfilled that they
must have sounded like the heraldings of the judgment of God. But it may
be that foreknowledge of the future rested on a consciousness of the past.
There, in the desert, had stood a bedouin preparing the tenets of a
creed; in the remoter past a shadow in which there was lightning, then the
splendor of the first dawn where the future opened like a book, and, in
that grammar of the eternal, the promise of an age of gold. Through the
echo of succeeding generations came the rumor of the impulse that drew the
world in its flight. The bedouin had put the desert behind him and stared
at another, the sea. As he passed, the land leaped into life. There were
tents and passions, clans not men, an aggregate of forces in which the
unit disappeared. For chieftain there was Might and, above, were the
subjects of impersonal verbs, the Elohim, from whom the thunder came, the
rain, darkness and light, death and birth, dream too, nightmare as well.
The clans migrated. Goshen called. In its heart Chaldaea spoke. The Elohim
vanished and there was El, the one great god and Isra-el, the great god's
elect. From heights that lost themselves in immensity, the ineffable name,
incommunicable, and never to be pronounced, was seared by forked flames on
a tablet of stone. A nation learned that El was Jehovah, that they were in
his charge, that he was omnipotent, that the world was theirs. They had a
law, a covenant, a deity and, as they passed into the lands of the well
beloved, the moon became their servant, to aid them the sun stood still.
The terror of Sinai gleamed from their breast-plates. Men could not see
their faces and live. They encroached and conquered. They had a home, then
a capital, where David founded a line of kings and Solomon, the city of
God.
Solomon, typically satrapic, living in what then was splendor; surrounded
by peacocks and peris; married to the daughter of a Pharaoh, married to
many another as well; the husband of seven hundred queens, the pasha of
three hundred favorites, doing, as perhaps a poet may, only what pleased
him, capricious as potentates are, voluptuous as sovereigns were, on his
blazing throne and particularly in his aromatic harem, presented a
spectacle strange in Israel, wholly Babylonian, thoroughly sultanesque. To
local austerity his splendor was an affront, his seraglio a sin, the
memory of both became odious, and in the Song of Songs, which,
canonically, was attributed to him, but which the higher criticism has
shown to be an anonymous work, that contempt was expressed.
Something else was expressed. The Song of Songs is the gospel of love.
Humanity at the time was sullen when not base. Nowhere was there love. The
anterior stories of Jacob and Rachel, of Rebekah and Isaac, of Boaz and
Ruth, are little novels, subsequently evolved, concerning people that had
lived long before and probably never lived at all. To scholars they are
wholly fabulous. Even otherwise, these legends do not, when analyzed,
disclose love. Ruth herself with her magnificent phrase--"Where thou
goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall
be my people, and thy God my God,"--does not display it. Historically its
advent is in the Song of Songs.
The poem, perhaps originally a pastoral in dialogue form, but more
probably a play, has, for central situation, the love of a peasant for a
shepherd, a love tender and true, stronger than death, stronger at least
than a monarch's will. The scene, laid three thousand years ago in
Solomon's seraglio, represents the triumph of constancy over corruption,
the constancy of a girl, unique in her day, who resisted a king,
preferring a hovel to his harem. In an epoch more frankly unmoral than any
of which history has cognizance, this girl, a native of Shulam, very
simple, very ignorant, necessarily unrefined, possessed, through some
miracle, that instinctive exclusiveness which, subsequently disseminated
and ingrained, refurbished the world. She was the usher of love. The Song
of Songs, interpreted mystically by the Church and profanely by scholars,
is therefore sacred. It is the first evangel of the heart.
From the existing text, the original plan, and with it the original
meaning, have disappeared. Many exegetes, notably Ewald, have demonstrated
that the disappearance is due to manipulations and omissions, and many
others, Renan in particular, have attempted reconstructions. The version
here given is based on his.[3] From it a few expressions, no longer in
conformity with modern taste, and several passages, otherwise redundant,
have been omited. By way of proem it may be noted that the Shulamite,
previously abducted from her native village--a hamlet to the north of
Jerusalem--is supposed to be forcibly brought into the presence of the
king where, however, she has thought only of her lover.
THE SONGS OF SONGS.
ACT I.
SOLOMON, IN ALL HIS GLORY, SURROUNDED BY HIS SERAGLIO AND HIS GUARDS.
AN ODALISQUE
Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.
CHORUS OF ODALISQUES
Thy love is better than delicious wine. Thy name is ointment poured
forth. Therefore do we love thee.
THE SHULAMITE
(_forcibly introduced, speaking to her absent lover._)
The King hath brought me into his chamber. Draw me away, we will go
together.
THE ODALISQUES
(_to_ SOLOMON.)
The upright love thee. We will be glad and rejoice in thee. We will
remember thy love more than wine.
THE SHULAMITE
(_to the_ ODALISQUES.)
I am black but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, comely as the tents
of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon. Do not disdain me because I am a
little black. It is the sun that has burned me. My mother's children
were angry at me. They made me keeper of the vineyards. Alas! mine own
vineyard I have not kept.
(_Thinking of her absent lover._)
Tell me, O thou whom my soul loveth, where thou takest thy flocks to
rest at noon that I may not wander among the flocks of thy comrades.
AN ODALISQUE
If thou knowest not, O thou fairest among women, follow the flock and
feed thy kids by the shepherds' tents.
SOLOMON
(_to the_ SHULAMITE.)
To my horse, when harnessed to the chariot that Pharaoh sent me, I
compare thee, O my love. Thy cheeks are comely with rows of pearls,
thy neck with charms of coral. We will make for thee necklaces of gold,
studded with silver.
THE SHULAMITE
(_aside._)
While the King sitteth at his divan, my spikenard perfumes me and to me
my beloved is a bouquet of myrrh, unto me he is as a cluster of cypress
in the vines of Engedi.
SOLOMON
Yes, thou art fair, my beloved. Yes, thou art fair. Thine eyes are the
eyes of a dove.
THE SHULAMITE
(_thinking of the absent one._)
Yes, thou art fair, my beloved. Yes, thou art charming, and our tryst is
a litter of green.
SOLOMON
(_to whom constancy has no meaning._)
The beams of our house are cedar and our rafters of fir.
THE SHULAMITE
(_singing._)
I am the rose of Sharon The lily of the valley am I.
(ENTER _suddenly the_ SHEPHERD.)
THE SHEPHERD
As a lily among thorns, so is my love among daughters.
THE SHULAMITE
(_running to him._)
As is the apple among fruit, so is my beloved among men. In delight I
have sat in his shadow and his savor was sweet to my taste. He brought
me to the banquet hall and put o'er me the banner of love.
(_Turning to the_ ODALISQUES.)
Stay me with wine, strengthen me with fruit, for I am swooning with
love.
(_Half-fainting she falls in the_ SHEPHERD'S _arms._)
His left hand is under my head and his right hand doth embrace me.
THE SHEPHERD
(_to the_ ODALISQUES.)
I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes and the hinds of
the field, that ye stir not, nor awake my beloved till she will.
THE SHULAMITE
(_dreaming in the_ SHEPHERD'S _arms._)
My own love's voice. Arise, my fair one, he tells me, arise and let us
go....
THE SHEPHERD
I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, that ye stir not, nor awake
my beloved till she will.
(SOLOMON _motions; the_ SHEPHERD _is removed._)