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

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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.