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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.