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

50 страница из 92

In later ages, when the human body became as it were dichotomous in function, the merely physiological acts began to be held in lesser esteem, and even became condemnatory in status, open to reproach and disdain, and even violent abuse and ill-treatment. The body, in fact, became obscene, invested with evil forces, compounded of malefic and defiled factors. The body was to be crushed and tortured and disfigured, in order to release the spiritual complements of the human being. The amatory acts were now turned into licentious and mephitic obscenities, into bestial defilements, into unspeakable carnal and animal manifestations of the lower nature. As a consequence, phallic worship, the glorification of the creative principle embodied in the male and female, went underground. And by the mere fact of going underground, it persisted, with qualifications, acquiring through the course of time veneers of secrecy, accretions of furtiveness, elements of ribaldry as a kind of protective coat.

Essentially, the phallic symbol was anciently viewed as an amatory agent, a generative stimulant, in as much as the phallus was cosmically the source of all being. Therefore offerings were made to the phallus in sacrificial rituals, just as to any other potent deity from whom privileges and favors were sought. Libations of milk were a normal form of offering to Priapus. Women, anxious to become mothers, stood reverently and suppliantly in puris naturalibus before the all-potent phalli, and in a further urgent procedure, performed the act of erotic consummation with the aid of the lingam figure itself. For the phallus, in a pose of lubricity, was the final appeal, the ultimate resort, of the pleading, awed, reverential mortal.