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

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In ancient orgiastic cults, particularly those dedicated to Dionysus and to the Syrian Baal, religious frenzies were accompanied or stimulated by drugs, fermented drink, by rhythmic dance movements, by tambourine, drum, and flute music that culminated in ecstatic self-mutilation followed by wild sexual debaucheries.

Passion, lust, incest, fornication, adultery, as well as concubinage and polygamy, most of the sexual perversions and aberrations that are now included under medico-psychiatric categories, occur in the Bible, in both Testaments.

King David married eight women. On his flight from Absalom he left ten concubines behind him. Jacob had two wives. King Solomon had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines.

There are instances of enduring affection too, as in the case of Jacob, who labored for Rachel for fourteen years.

There is sudden, rapturous love at first sight, at all costs:

It happened, late one afternoon, when David arose from his couch and was walking upon the roof of the king’s house, that he saw from the roof a woman bathing, and the woman was very beautiful. And David sent and inquired about the woman. And one said, “Is not this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite?”