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

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In this mystic cult of the goddess, the hierodule, the courtesan, is the intermediary between the suppliant and the divinity. She is the sexual passport, so to speak, that leads to the more secretive ritual of the Aphroditic temple.

There is, in the course of this rite, the necessity for a purgation, a purification by water. There is a reference to such an initiation in the Roman poet Juvenal’s second satire. He speaks of a mystic sect called the Baptae. This expression derives from the Greek baptizo, dipping in water. The Baptae drank, as an element in their ritual, powerful liquids from phallus-shaped vessels. These Baptae were devotees of Cotytto, an obscene and salacious goddess.

Women were not admitted to the Aphroditic rites: but, strangely, the men came robed as women, painted and powdered and reeking in exotic perfumes. Subsequently, they dedicated themselves to every form of sexual subtlety.

In another more advanced stage of initiation, where physical love became sublimated, Aphrodite was in this phase the Syrian goddess Derceto or Atargatis: the half woman, half fish deity. Basically she was a fertility goddess, sometimes called Dea Syria, the Syrian goddess, the universal divinity. Her cult is described by the Greek writer Lucian: and Apuleius, the Roman philosopher and novelist, speaks about her priests, the wandering Galli: