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

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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.