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

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For centuries man and woman have displayed mutual hostilities and resentments in a number of directions: personally and socially, politically and spiritually. Yet there appears a strange dichotomy in this human pair of male and female. They have despised each other and have sought each other, as Plato suggests in one of his more fanciful moments. The mutual act of racial procreation merged and was subsequently largely lost in the erotic consummations itself. So that, as the complexities of life grew, and as its manifestations multiplied and offered man a variety of experiences, motifs, recreational facilities and diversions, the woman as such came into her own, and Aphrodite established her sacred and profane sanctuaries at the crossroads, in sundered islands of the Aegean Sea, on the highways, in luxurious retreats, and in rural fastnesses. And, casting aside all spiritualities in man’s search for a teleological significance to existence, made Eros the alpha and omega, the final purpose, of cosmic being.