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

53 страница из 92

One of the peculiar features of the Baptae was their custom of drinking from glass vessels shaped like a phallus. Juvenal, the Roman satirist, in describing the Baptae and their mystic and symbolic rites, refers to one participant who drinks from a glass Priapus: vitreo bibit ille Priapo.

According to the testimony of the Greek historian Herodotus, a certain Melampus brought the cult of Bacchus, the worship of the generative capacity, to Greece, approximately in the thirteenth century B.C. He expounded the features of the Egyptian cult and established processional rites and ceremonies adapted from Egyptian usage.

In ancient Greece Bacchus, the phallic divinity, was equated with Dionysus. In the cities the Greater Dionysia, or the Urban Dionysia, were celebrated in his honor for three days. The locale was at Limnae in Attica, and the season was the middle of the month of March.

In very early times, the Greek biographer and philosopher Plutarch declares, the rites were of a simple but joyous nature. But in his own time the celebration had reached a lavish, extravagant splendor.