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

58 страница из 92

Among the Moslems too the most binding oath was taken with respect to the sanctity of the genitalia.

In Egypt, in the temple of Isis, sacred prostitution was a regular religious practice. Reference to this circumstance is made by the Roman satirist, Juvenal, who calls Isis a procuress and her shrine a rendez-vous for adulterous and libidinous practices.

Among symbolic emblems that represented, in combination, the male and female principles of generation and fecundity, were the Egyptian crux ansata and the seal of Solomon.

The phallic symbol was so pervasive, so potent, in the lives of the ancients, that the priapic function and the erotic variations of the generative performance were pictorially represented in every conceivable form of reproduction: scenes on vases representing perverted consummations: baskets filled with phalli that were offered for sale to yearning women: ithyphallic figures: monuments, lamps and other objects depicting orgiastic lubricities.

In Ezekiel 16.17 there is a reference to the phallic figure: Fecisti tibi imagines masculinas et fornicata es in eis.