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

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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.