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

71 страница из 92

At the Greek celebration of the Phallophoria, leather or wooden representations of the phallus were carried processionally through the public streets of the polis. It was the thematic manifestation of all-embracing fertility, on land, among the beasts of the fields, and in human relationships. It was a kind of visual paean, in fact, to the primal sexual impulse, to the basic erotic conflict.

One of the earliest instances of multiple incest occurs in Book 10 of Homer’s Odyssey, in which Odysseus describes his visit to Aeolus. Aeolus has a family of six daughters and six sons, and he has given his daughters in marriage to his own sons.

In Greece the Aphrodision, and in Rome the Venereum, were the private bordellos that were not used by the general indiscriminate public.

Both in antiquity and in later ages the public baths, with both sexes in nude contacts in the balnea mixta, were a direct amatory stimulant. As further provocatives, there was, in particular cases, bathing in asses’ milk, in essences of myrtle and lavender, in rose water, in almond paste and in honey water, and also in champagne.