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

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The next step in this genesiac process was sacred prostitution, whereby the woman symbolized the solemnity and the compulsiveness of the Aphroditic cult, while the man was the visitant, a suppliant for the favor of the divinity. And the hierodule thus was a kind of prototype, associated with wise skills, a vestal of the goddess, initiating men into secret amatory and sacred rituals: an adept too in concocting love philtres to further genesiac exultation, to induce total participation in a sort of Aphroditic gnosticism.

The Aphroditic injunction embraced, in a sense, the entire cosmos. It involved primarily self-love, love of being, awareness of the significant entity, the ego itself, marked by dignity, by esteem. Then followed the love of the social milieu of which one formed part, and of the impulse to maintain its equilibrium by contributing one’s own efforts, one’s personal function, to the totality of the social frame. Lastly, there was a kind of all-embracing, comprehensive cosmic love, directed to a synthesis of corporeal love that mystically rose to a sublimated spiritual-amatory zone.