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

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Woman was conceived as attaining her sanguinary or lustful purposes by means of feminine stratagems or conspiratorial schemes, by personal ruthlessness that swept aside all frustrations, all moralities, and stopped neither at poisoning nor at murder. The roster of such women, in the stream of universal history, is long and challenging. It includes, among many others equally notorious, equally branded, Lilith and Cleopatra, Claudia and Messalina, Antonina and Theodora, Catherine of Russia and Elizabeth Bathory, Madame de Montespan and Lady Kyteler, the Borgias and Isobel Gowdie, Jeannette Biscar: and, in goetic contexts, Sagana, Canidia, and Oenothea.

Aphrodite had many forms, multiple aspects of her functions and her patronage, numberless descriptive designations, both in Greece itself and in the cults of Asia Minor where her attributes were equated with the properties of analogous and indigenous divinities. But basically she was one, the universal, the cosmic force that dominates all amatory contacts, that drives men, intent votaries of the goddess and bent on adherent dedication to her offices, to the realization of her injunctions at all costs, resorting to charms and mystic recipes, to fantastic interpretations of precious stones and flowers, to talismans and amatory manuals, grimoires, exotic herbs and insidious preparations.