Читать книгу Love Potions Through the Ages: A Study of Amatory Devices and Mores онлайн

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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.