Читать книгу Love Potions Through the Ages: A Study of Amatory Devices and Mores - Harry E. Wedeck - Страница 5

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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.

National Gallery of Art

THE KISS

by Rodin

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.