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

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The energized, salient phallus was the supreme symbol of being and fertility. In antiquity it had divine significance. It was carried in religious processions in ancient Egypt, in Greece, in the Greek islands, in Phoenicia, Assyria, and in Chaldea and Ethiopia. In Egypt, phalli, made of porcelain, were worn on the person as periapts.

In their fulminations against pagan mores and the sexual and erotic licentiousness and aberrations that were so prevalent in antiquity both socially and religiously, the ancient writers themselves were so descriptively forthright and detailed in their denunciations, that these very assaults and condemnatory attacks constitute in themselves, cumulatively, a vast corpus of circumstantial knowledge of ancient salaciousness, prurience, perversions, and total abandonment of amatory and sexual restraints. Among such witnesses and authorities were the Church Fathers Tertullian, Arnobius, and Clement of Alexandria.

The religious practice of women submitting or rather offering themselves to the priapic symbol, the phallus or lingam, dates back to millennia before this era. Herodotus, the Greek historian, mentions it; also Strabo the geographer, and the Church Father Clement of Alexandria.