CHAPTER IX
MIDDLE AGES AND LATER
In the earlier Christian centuries, misogynistic attitudes were markedly prevalent, especially among the dogmatizing Church Fathers, and despite the traditions of the agape. Clemens and Ambrose, Tertullian and Athanasius were impassioned and vociferous, both in their oral denunciations, and in their written invectives against the essentially evil and malefic nature of woman.
Hence sexual love was anathema to them: and even marriage, grudgingly conceded but rarely accepted, was an object of horrified scorn. In consequence, it was not surprising that sexual interests and activities should go underground, as it were, and that amatory aids and encouragements likewise developed their secretive hiding places, their esoteric emporia, their identifiable but undisclosed havens.
The result was that, as the Middle Ages advanced, two basic views appeared to come into force. Laws that governed the marriage ceremonial and its consequent domestic involvements and possessive obligations. And laws that related to love as such, to the amor naturalis, as defined by St. Thomas Aquinas, both in its romantic sense as a kind of amatory but undefined ideal, and in its sexual implications that reached as far as adultery, under certain subdued, well-controlled, and unpublicized circumstances.
All these occasions created a hungry, frantic demand for philtres and phials and nostrums of all varieties, of all degrees of efficacy. They bloomed upon the markets, and gave employment and a vast impetus to quacks and adventurers, to alchemists and beldams, in furnishing the tantalizing apparatus of love.
One of the most dominant humanists during the Middle Ages was Albertus Magnus (1193–1280). Of Germanic birth, he was educated in Padua and Bologna. On account of his encyclopedic knowledge, he was generally known as the Doctor Universalis.
Professor of theology, scientist, teacher, he achieved, both by his voluminous writings and his lectures, an almost legendary reputation. In one of his treatises, De Secretis Mulierum, he expounds on feminine matters and then proceeds to discuss, in his De Virtutibus Lapidum Quorundam Libellus, the virtues and properties of certain precious and semi-precious stones. In an amatory direction, Albertus Magnus gives suggestions, as if they were prescriptive and categorically assertive, on how to win the favor and affection of a person:
Take the stone called Chalcedony. It may be black or red, and is extracted from the stomach of swallows. Wrap the red stone in a linen cloth or in calf skin and place it under the left armpit.
Although the philtre that is intended to inspire erotic excitations is normally a drink, a fluid, Albertus Magnus’ recipe is virtually and in its ultimate sense a potion. He adds, on a later occasion in the same text:
If you want to promote love between two people, take the stone called Echites, by some termed Aquileus—because eagles place it in their nests. It is purple in color and is found on the sea shore: sometimes, too, in Persia. And it always contains within itself another stone that makes a sound when moved. The ancient philosophers say that this stone, worn suspended on the left arm, effects love between a man and a woman.
In the thirteenth century, a certain Arnold of Villanova, a physician who traveled widely throughout Europe and in Africa, was reputed to be a powerful karcist, believed to have occult contacts and interests. He dabbled, also, in alchemy, and, as legend rumored, was proficient in actual transmutations. In his medical practice he relied largely on herbal concoctions, on magic formulas, on amatory potions prepared according to traditional prescriptions.
Potions and love philtres pervaded all life, at all levels, throughout the middle centuries. Peasant and pilgrim resorted to aged creatures who were reputed to possess cryptic formulas, hidden resources transmitted to them orally by their forbears. Even in the Eucharistic rite the poculum amatorium made its contorted intrusion. In the Eucharistic rite, the wafer often became an ingredient in love potions and acquired a particularly efficacious renown.
Most dealings in love devices, secret formulas, erotic phials, were nameless, both the client and the practitioners remaining unknown by name to each other. Until the practitioner became so assertive, so prosperous and so much in demand that people flocked from remote regions, from distant cities, from foreign countries, to acquire the ultimate elixir. Count Alessandro Cagliostro was shrewd and unscrupulous enough to profit by such conditions. He was an Italian alchemist, magician, and hermetic, but basically his qualifications and capacities were at least dubious. What was not at all dubious was his facility in outwitting all Europe, in amassing great wealth from gullible clients, in escaping, on all but the ultimate occasion, from merited penalties. His original name was Giuseppe Balsamo, and his restless life extended from 1745 to 1795.
In the heyday of his quackery he became both known and notorious throughout Europe. He was persona gratissima among the most distinguished social circles and families. With the aid of his wife Lorenza Feliccani he amassed enormous wealth by the sale of alchemical compounds, magic elixirs, and love potions. Scandals followed his movements and implicated him in fantastic incidents, salacious episodes. Hence, for security or secrecy, he was constantly changing his abode. In his last years, he suffered imprisonment, in the fortress of San Leo. And with his death, the legends proliferated and multiplied. Strange feats were recorded of him. Mystic phenomena appeared at his potent will. According to such traditions, he was a necromancer, having exorcised a dead woman. At a public banquet he invoked the dead spirits of Diderot and Voltaire. And he was the founder of a secret organization known as The Egyptian Lodge, where goetic practices and sorcery were attempted and consummated.
Cagliostro had a kind of counterpart in the arcane arts. Catherine La Voisin was a notorious French fortune-teller, as well as a reputed witch. For the most part, she was a dispenser of love philtres, and plied her sinister trade in low and high circles. In this capacity she was intimately associated with the obscene and erotic operations of Madame de Montespan. Madame de Montespan, mistress of King Louis XIV of France, reached a point where her amatory offerings no longer aroused the King. Steps had to be taken, urgently and effectively, to recover that affection. With the aid of Catherine La Voisin, she concocted love philtres. She participated in magical rites, in amatory Masses, and even in child sacrifice, to gain her passionate purpose. In this sinister machination she enlisted the support of a notorious Abbé Guibourg. His scatological and lascivious activities in this respect brought about his arrest, and his summary execution.
The love-potion, then, could be, potentially, a tremendously evil force, a malefic and fatal weapon, an instrument of ruin and death. But usually the potion was associated with soft and luxurious dalliance, with amorous whisperings, with marital exchanges and sophisticated deceits. So it was in Italy in particular. In the sixteenth century, many Jewesses dabbled in love potions and amatory charms. They practiced their skill in Rome itself, and acquired an established reputation as purveyors of these physiological stimuli. Ferdinand Gregorovius, who produced a monumental history of Rome, declares that Jewish women brewed love philtres in the dark of the night, for their languishing customers, the ladies of Rome.
Lippold, a Jewish financier of the Elector Joachim II of Brandenburg, who also belongs in the sixteenth century, was accused, among other charges based on magic practices, of dispensing recipes for the concoction of love philtres. He was brutally tortured: then executed in Berlin.
The medieval era was a period of absorption of the past, with occasional tentative gropings and some experimentation in new directions. In the erotic sphere, the Middle Ages adopted this antique heritage, at times moulded and modified it, and sometimes made use of it in new contexts. Thus there was in use an aromatic herb called popularly Sweet Flag. This was the plant known anciently as acorus calamus, that the Romans believed to be endowed with erotic stimulus. It was appropriately known to them by the alternate name of the plant of Venus.
In their tenebrous laboratories, equipped with weird paraphernalia, lit by the glow of furnace fire, the experimenting alchemists busied themselves with their apparatus. On tables and benches stood, in confused array, retorts of fantastic shape, flasks and tubes, alembics and phials containing strange viscous multi-colored fluids, fungus growths, particles of obscene matter, unnameable secretions. Some liquids, under the influence of tiny flames, hissed and spluttered with cunning animation. All these brews were undergoing action by fire and intermingling of chemicals, were being forced into mutations and directions for horrendous ends: and, dominantly among these objectives, was the illusive mutation into gold, but also the discovery of the source of being, the elixir of life, the rejuvenating creative essence that would promote youthfulness and vigor, passion and potency.
The medieval occultist and the alchemist did not always remain, as tradition believed, secluded in their own ivory tower, or rather in their laboratories. In many senses, they were decided realists, and they made profitable use of their knowledge and experimentations in the direction of astrological horoscopes, fortune-telling, and the preparation of philtres. There was, particularly, a potion in great demand among amorous but disappointed swains of every degree and rank. It was, according to general hearsay, a beverage whose basic ingredient was gold. The preparation was consumed daily, over a space of time, as a kind of amatory potable gold.
Many types of potions were resorted to in the Middle Ages. Some acted as physiological excitants, but involved great circumspection in securing the ingredients. These ingredients were often organic fragments: hair of the beloved one obtained surreptitiously. Or nail parings. Or a shred torn from an intimately worn garment. Such items were then burned, and, when reduced to ashes, mixed with wine and used as a philtre.
In other cases, all sorts of putatively effective concoctions, never of course analyzed as to the contents by the passionate pursuer, were involved. They were freely sold in the market towns of medieval Europe, in battlemented castles, in remote hamlets. They were brought as elixirs by returning travelers from distant countries, and were eagerly purchased in the ports and capitals of the continent. Especially when these travelers reinforced their importations with tales and anecdotes that testified to the amazing virtues of their brews.
The Elizabethan Age is noted for its tremendous intellectual productivity, for its relish in living, its adventurous ways on the high seas, in exploration, in colonization, in discovery. In the drama, in the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, of Marlowe and Ford and Ben Jonson and Thomas Dekker, the social and erotic phases of this tumultuous era play no mean or insignificant role. In palace and hut, in court and manor, the primary motif was love, in all its tantalizing manifestations. Love pervaded all. And the instruments for promoting love were all important, transcending domesticity and tranquillity, honor and ethics. The secretive drug, the rare pill, the poculum amatorium, the brew distilled by the wizened alchemist, the imported philtre, the dramatic potion are all made contributory to the furtherance of love and lust, to erotic subjugation, conquest, and mastery.
The corpus of Shakespearean plays, as an instance, contains a number of allusions to concoctions relating to amorous experiences. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 3, Scene 2, Oberon, King of the Fairies, addresses Puck:
Puck: I took him sleeping—that is finished too— And the Athenian woman by his side; That, when he waked, of force she must be eyed.
Later, in the same play, another reference of the same kind appears:
Further on, in the same act, Lysander, in love with Hermia, addresses her thus:
In The Winters Tale, Act 1, Scene 2, Camillo, Lord of Sicilia, addresses Leontes, King of Sicilia:
In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Act 3, Scene 1, the Host says to Caius:
Shall I lose my doctor? no; he gives me the potions and the motions.
In Pericles, Act 1, Scene 2, Pericles addresses Helicanus:
In Part 1, Henry IV, Act 5, Scene 3, the Prince of Wales speaks:
And again, in Part 2, Act 1, Scene 1, Morton declares:
In these previously cited instances, in the Shakespearean contexts, it is evident that the term potion had often a malefic connotation, implying venom and destruction in its use. But it was equally a term of amatory and sensual significance, associated largely with physiological refreshment.
In Dr. Faustus, Christopher Marlowe’s drama, the protagonist, passionately eager to embrace all knowledge that offers power, that is, the thaumaturgic and necromantic skills, exclaims:
He then proceeds, after his pact with Mephistopheles, to demand the implementation of the conditions. He is aroused erotically, and commands:
Mephistopheles, virtually a pander, suggesting provocative amatory delights, promises:
In a later scene, Robin the Ostler appears with one of Dr. Faustus’ grimoires:
Robin: Oh, this is admirable! here I ha’ stolen one of Doctor Faustus’ conjuring books, and i’ faith I mean to search some circles for my own use. Now will I make all the maidens in our parish dance at my pleasure, stark-naked before me; and so by that means I shall see more than e’er I felt or saw yet.
Rafe: Robin, prithee, come away; there’s a gentleman tarries to have his horse, and he would have his things rubbed and made clean: he keeps such a chafing with my mistress about it; and she has sent me to look thee out. Prithee, come away.
Robin: Keep out, keep out, or else you are blown up; you are dismembered, Rafe: keep out, for I am about a roaring piece of work.
Rafe: Come, what dost thou with that same book? Thou cans’t not read.
Robin: Yes, my master and mistress shall find that I can read, he for his forehead, she for her private study; she’s born to bear with me, or else my art fails.
Rafe: Why, Robin, what book is that?
Robin: What book! Why, the most intolerable book for conjuring that e’er was invented by any brimstone devil.
Rafe: Can’st thou conjure with it?
Robin: I can do all these things easily with it; first, I can make thee drunk with ippocras at any tavern in Europe for nothing; that’s one of my conjuring works.
Rafe: Our Master Parson says that’s nothing.
Robin: True, Rafe; and more, Rafe, if thou hast any mind to Nan Spit, our kitchenmaid, then turn her and wind her to thy own use as often as thou wilt, and at midnight.
Rafe: O brave Robin, shall I have Nan Spit, and to mine own use?
Frequently consulted on erotic difficulties were the ubiquitous witches who flourished in the Middle Ages throughout the European continent. In the literature of these middle centuries their amatory brews are used in a variety of passionate situations, to inspire love, to divert it into strange channels, and, sometimes, to crush it. On occasion the repulsive and abhorrent ingredients, both animal and human, are noted with a land of macabre relish. But the urgent suppliant, bent on his lustful self-appointed mission, rarely hesitated on that account. On the contrary, the rare or obscene nature of the brew was like an added spurt to his frantic libido: and the more distasteful the composition, the more intense the lustfulness that was so inspired.
It was not unusual for the philtres and preparations to contain animal testes, genitalia, human excremental matter, even fragments and shreds of human corpses, torn from graveyards and charnel-houses.
An extreme type of potion, administered in febrile cases, was actual blood, drunk by both man and woman.
The Middle Ages, particularly the eleventh century, was noted for its loose morality, its amorous diversions, its disregard of the old rigid domestic or social prohibitions and restraints. Achievement followed on desire, and sensuous and sensual whims met with ready acquiescence. Returning warriors, home from the Crusades in Palestine, or the campaigns in Spain, had, during the course of their embattled activities, come in contact with disturbing exotic women, so different, in both physical appearance and temperament, from the wives and women they had left in the châteaux and manors. These exotic women were brought back by the returning victors as captives. Once returned, the warriors looked back with something of nostalgia to their colorful days in foreign regions and in novel circumstances. Hence the captive women became a kind of live substitute for such meditations. The women consoled the warriors with murmurous love songs of their own country, sorrowful and prideful and exotic. And often the wives of these lords of the manor were unpleasantly surprised when these strange women were invited to domesticity as concubines. So that the medieval nobility became, in the course of time, a complicated series of relationships, tainted with harlotries and illegitimacies.
In these libidinous and licentious conditions, when exhaustion or age began to make perceptible appearance, amatory aids were sought, and philtres and brews were hopefully measured out by the furtive creatures, male and female, peripatetic vendors, sorceresses, quacks and occultists, who were always equipped, always prepared, to supply the passionate clamor.
The medieval passion for love aroused complications. Particularly, it aroused jealousy in the husband himself, however gallant or wayward he might be. Lovers or husbands, discovering the indiscretions and sportiveness of a mistress, a concubine, or a wife, exacted the utmost and not rarely the most barbaric penalties. A wife was compelled to eat her dead lover’s heart. Another wife was forced to congregate with lepers because her conduct enraged her lawful spouse. One husband served up the heart of the slain adulterer in the form of a stew for his wife.
Yet the husband appeared to be exempt from any penalties inflicted for divergent amorous experiences in which he himself might be involved. For the man was dominant. The husband was equated with the ineluctable law. And the husband imposed that law upon his womankind. The male might consequently indulge with more than a fair chance of impunity in adultery, fornication, excessive lust.
And when these excitements seemed ultimately to approach physiological impairment, there was always the nostrum, and the extended hand of the aged crone, offering her mystic potion, her amatory panacea.
The permutations of amatory complications in the social frame of the Middle Ages, involving peasant and noble, troubadour and harlot, occasional damsels, poets, mistresses and concubines, resulted sometimes in a frantic movement toward chastity. Renunciation of carnal delights, of the amor naturalis that implied physical and sensual love only, became a pose, then a principle, then a habit, however, at times, it might be infringed or dishonored.
Chastity belts were devised by departing warriors to enforce continence upon their wives. Chastity tests, ingeniously contrived, became popular experiments in sexual restraints. It was the vogue, and the vogue became mores. Just as Tristan and Yseult slept with a naked sword between them.
And in excessive cases there was the weird but apparently effective device, for propagation purposes only, of the chemise cagoule.
And always, in the wake of these temporary waves of contrition or repentance, there followed, as a consequence of plague, violence, political unrest, banditry and war, a terrifying unleashing of all human inhibitions, a bacchanalian orgy of prolonged lechery and debauchery, reminiscent of Thucydides’ dramatic account of the Athenian plague during the Peloponnesian War.
In the aftermath of these lecheries there arose perplexities, complications in erotic directions, incapacity through perversions and excesses: and a consequent hungry, voracious quest for remedial measures: drugs and drinks devised by itinerant traders, nostrums compounded by wily serfs and jongleurs, alchemical elixirs distilled in secret dens by putative adepts.
Women, in an amatory sense, were far from neglected in the Middle Ages. Many handbooks appeared that offered hints and guidance on dress, deportment, osculation and its limitations, social behavior, cleanliness, bathing and washing.
And if the object of the woman’s passion was preoccupied elsewhere, or hesitant, or indifferent to her insistence or her personal charms, there was always recourse to the potion, by means of which she could have her way.
In France, in the Middle Ages, prostitution was so rampant and seeped into the life of the people and the nobility to such an alarming extent that the pious King Saint Louis, who flourished in the thirteenth century, promulgated a series of stringent decrees against prostitutes.
Yet Paris was notoriously populated with prostitutes. They practiced their occupation day and night, except on sacred days, in the most obscure rendez-vous, in inns and bath houses and cellars. François Villon, the poet of the brothel, and one of the chief sources for these days, casts a lurid but realistic light on this phase of the medieval scene.
Philtres were a common commodity in these circumstances, in spite of the spread of disease. For le mal de Naples, as it was virtuously called in France, but which the Italians as virtuously termed le mal français, was ravaging Europe. The disease, to give it its modern name, was syphilis.
Although the Middle Ages were intimately familiar with love and lust in all its lawful as well as its secretive phases, the amatory state itself occasioned such temperamental and physiological and characterial changes in the aspirant or the postulant that the question arose: Was love itself worth while?
This question was specifically asked by Andreas Capellanus, who belongs in the thirteenth century. He produced a handbook on the Art of Courtly Love, in which he listed rules, and gave directions, in connection with the conduct of the lover who is involved in a spiritual passion for the knight’s wife, the queen, or a mistress of a manor.
Yet Andreas Capellanus also gives a sober, solemn warning against the ill effects of love, for of all disastrous results, it makes men old with untimely rapidity. Women, then, the source of this malefic consequence, should be shunned. They are avaricious. They are ruthless. They are faithless. They are dishonorable. This invective recalls a remarkably similar assault on women and their ways, the thunderous, condemnatory, bitter satire on women by the Roman satirist Juvenal.
In the Middle Ages amatory broths were in such demand that the most obscure, the most nauseating, and sometimes actually venomous items were indiscriminately compounded into philtres. Intimate human secretions, blood, animal semen and other discharges, formed the fluid basis for the incorporation of genitalia of animals, macerated sparrow brains, and analogous animal matter.
Such concoctions were designed to correct physiological disorders and natural weaknesses and defects in the person so affected.
One of the most significant treatises on love, applicable in its essential features to every age, although produced in the Middle Ages, is Le Roman de la Rose. It is an erotic allegory, begun in 1240 by Guillaume de Lorris, and completed in 1280 by Jean de Meun: a remote partnership that was nevertheless so effective as to make the book continuously popular for several centuries.
There are numberless precepts and suggestions regarding the material phases of love: personal appearance, social accomplishments, and in a more general way the requisite mode of behavior for the amatory suppliant. Above all, insistence is on giving free rein to passion and on indulging in every conceivable variety of erotic voluptuousness and sensual pleasure. And women, the treatise reminds one, are essentially as free as men in this respect. So that, when the passions subside and require increased fuel, the potion could be sought equally by men and women.
The philtre appears in imaginative literature no less than in actuality. The Wagnerian opera based on the Tristan and Yseult legend presents a heroine who is far from the submissive and dutiful medieval female, subservient to her amorous lord and master. She is highly selfish in her ways, and her love for Tristan is conditioned by the administration of a love-potion.
Medieval mortality distinguished between conjugal love and sexual love that extended, on the part of both husband and wife, beyond the domestic frontiers. Hence in many instances an insistent lover would resort to some provocative potion in order to bring the amatory objective into submission.
One of the most ravishing women in all history was Diane de Poitiers, who for some three decades was the mistress of the French king Henri II. Her beauty remained untarnished far beyond the usually allotted span. She was imitated by every woman: in her manner of walking, her hair styles, her general behavior. All society, all France was at her feet as the unattainable ideal woman. And she remained so long after her death.
Those who were particularly inquisitive about Diane de Poitiers’ method of prolonged beauty, whispered, and general gossip supported the belief, that the continuance of her appealing and attractive charms was due to certain potent love philtres that she had regularly used.
Before her death, Diane de Poitiers revealed what was evidently the composition of the potion. Every morning, she declared, she had been in the habit of drinking a liquid consisting of molten gold and certain unrevealed drugs that had been recommended by alchemists.
It is curious to discover that sensual and sexual voluptuousness and amorous contests, whether accepted according to traditional principles or forbidden and experienced secretly, could find a vociferous, articulate opponent. Yet in 1599 such an attack on loose morality and licentious freedom was published under the title of Antidote for Love, with a lengthy Discourse on the Nature and Causes thereof, together with the most singular Remedies for the Prevention and Cure of Amorous Passions. The author was a Frenchman, a certain Dr. Jean Aubery.
To stimulate genital vigor, the French in the Middle Ages advocated, as a complement to physiological activity, verbal love making. Oral caresses, endearing diminutives, the poetic battery of language that was so familiar to the ancient poets, to Alciphron and Theocritus, to Plautus, to Catullus, to Horace, came into popular use again. One chronicler devotes himself to some extent to this phase of amorous conquest. He recommends erotic murmurings, whisperings, coaxings, endearments. And without question such recommendations were generally reinforced with anatomical and sexual terms, obscene and scatological references, that strengthened the lascivious gestures and contortions of the participants. Similarly, in Spain and in Italy perfumes began to acquire their amatory appeal and value, and added their subtle allurements and insinuations to a potion, or to an erotic phial.
Le Tableau de l’Amour Conjugal was a kind of amatory encyclopedia, first published in 1696. The author was a Frenchman, a Dr. Nicolas Venette. In addition to a great deal of matter on amatory subjects, the effects of excesses, the causes of the validity of marriage, continence and debauchery, there were also discussions on physiological conditions, sexual relations, theories on the humors, on male and female temperaments and peculiarities.
In respect of stimulants, Dr. Venette recommended, among other arousing potions, crocodile kidneys. These were to be dried, then pounded into a powder, to which was added sweet wine. The result, according to Dr. Venette, was amazingly effective.
In eighteenth century France, la vie galante had grown to such proportions socially that many clubs were established, devoted exclusively and fantastically to licentious erotic practices, to the dissemination of amatory gossip and tales of well-known personalities, prominent in contemporary life, who were addicted, orgiastically and with abandonment, to amorous mores. There were even publications that published spicy titbits about such characters, without disguise of name or circumstance.
Among such clubs were La Société Joyeuse, Les Sunamites, La Paroisse, and Les Aphrodites. One group, called Les Restauratrices, used the methods and manipulations and stimulating potions and drugs that are so vividly described in Petronius’ Roman novel of the Satyricon. It was evident, then, that Les Restauratrices served men who had degenerated physiologically through age or extreme excesses.
These clubs recognized no amatory restraints whatever. They indulged in invented, ingenious permutations of amorous exercises, both privately and publicly, and even held competitions to decide the superior potency of members. The frequenters were ranked, in regard to prestige and distinction, according to the numerical extent of their encounters.
Birds and game were commonly used in amatory tonics. The medieval grimoires and manuals are packed with references to preparations that involve all parts of the bird as ingredients for erotic compounds. The philosopher and occultist Albertus Magnus, as an instance, who wrote on a vast number of allied subjects, prescribes, in one of his treatises, the brains of partridge, calcined into powder form, and steeped in red wine, as a prospective aid to vigor.
The licentious courts of France often experimented and used whatever lotion, concoction, or substance might prove effective in stimulating waning or exhausted capacities in the members of the court, both male and female. This quest grew to frantic and insidious proportions, for the entire court was tainted with perversions, sexual excesses, and exploratory monstrosities. For this purpose, then, ambergris, which is an ash-colored substance secreted in the intestines of the sperm whale, was used as a coating for chocolates, which were in the nature of titbits designed to arouse the courtiers, lechers, and gallants. As a perfume, ambergris was intended to provoke, through osphresiological channels, sensual attraction. Madame du Barry notoriously used ambergris as a means of ensuring Louis XV’s amatory interest.
Early chroniclers, herbalists, and compilers of miscellaneous knowledge often refer to tonics, pastilles, and compounds as amatory specifics, but provokingly do not name them. Thus in the Geneanthropoeia, virtually a textbook on anatomy and sexology, produced in 1642 by an Italian professor of medicine named Johannes Benedict Sinibaldus, there is reference to a plant indigenous to the Atlas Mountains in North Africa. This plant was reputedly of great erotic virtue. The difficulty lies in its identification.
Allusion is similarly and frequently made to certain trees, shrubs, and herbs of India that have analogous properties.
The eighteenth century in Europe became an age of debauchery and gluttony. It was the age of licentious drama, of lewd poetry, of unbridled lusts, of the overthrow of all moral and social restraints. This was the situation notably in England, and in France.
It is known now, almost axiomatically, that foods, particularly meats and game, stimulate sensual desires. Hence, when there was an excess of sexual diversion, indiscriminate and pervasive through all classes of society as a result of over indulgence in food and equally in drink, there was correspondingly a resultant physiological reaction, a weariness and incapacity and expenditure of energy that clamored for renewal, for stimulants, brews and philtres to remedy this parlous situation.
Similarly, in the Orient, from Arabia to Japan, in the South Seas no less than in Africa, the basic sustenance is not animal flesh, but a diet that is largely though not exclusively vegetarian.
Such a diet does not encourage erotic tendencies. In consequence, in the East as well as in the West but for quite divergent reasons, there grew up, through the centuries, corpora and manuals of prescriptions, contrivances, suggestions, and a diversity of aids conducive to amatory functions. In essence, the development was along the lines of an entire aphrodisiac laboratory.
Every conceivable substance, every presumed juice or blossom or spice was worthy of a trial, of being tested for its impact on procreative activity. So with borax. Refined and compounded into a beverage, borax was, in the seventeenth century, reputed to pervade the entire organic frame, and to produce highly favorable physiological reactions in the genital areas.
At the same time, borax was considered extremely dangerous in the view of practicing physicians, and its use was urgently deprecated, on account of its concomitant poisonous effects.
The seventeenth century was the century of the French King, Louis XIV, Le Roi Soleil. And his reign and personal life, and the society that encircled his court, were an incessant round of lavish gaiety, gross and scatological obscenities, and the most flagrant immoralities. Among other infamous episodes that marked this period were the machinations of Louis’ mistress, Madame de Montespan. She was involved, according to contemporary records, in poisoning one rival mistress and attempting the elimination of another by the same means. But chiefly Madame de Montespan is remembered for her febrile associations with sorceresses, reputed witches, whom she consulted for help in retaining King Louis’ affection. The principal aide and accomplice in these furtive and insidious operations was Catherine La Voison, a professed witch, a poisoner, a dealer in love-potions. It was from La Voisin that Madame de Montespan secured amatory charms and philtres.
In the issue, Madame de Montespan lost her intimate status with the King, while La Voisin was burned alive in Paris.
In the seventeenth century there appears in France The Great Almanach of Love. It contained directions for arousing sensual feelings. It suggested music and songs, sonnets and madrigals. But it also recommended, as more earthy enticements, meals that included a dish of beans, turkey, and sweets. These items were virtually love philtres.
An old medieval custom, that lasted until well into this century in Europe, was in the nature of a nuptial love-potion.
After a wedding feast, members of the village community set water to boil in a pot. Into the pot were thrown, in addition to pepper, garlic, and salt—which are essentially aphrodisiac in character—,less appetizing contributions, such as spiders’ webs and soot. The entire compound was stirred into an unsavory mixture, but both the bride and the groom were required to take at least a mouthful.
In essence, this brew was designed to arouse excitations on the part of the bridal pair, just as Plutarch refers to the bride nibbling fruit before retiring to bed.
In place of actual potions, the Middle Ages at times used what were essentially visual erotic stimulants. These were lewd pictures and drawings that were in great vogue, extensively so in the reign of King François I. Many among the French nobility made private collections of such provocative and scatological sketches that produced, in some cases, marked inflammatory erotic reactions. In certain country châteaux, also, stained glass windows depicted salacious episodes, libidinous postures and embraces, just as the caves of Ajanta in India portrayed amatory contortions in which human and animal performers were involved.
The subject of erotic practices, including perversions, abnormalities, flagellation, as well as philtres and amatory brews, was not limited to professional physicians. Many demonographers, including Martin Delrio, mentioned erotic techniques in their discussions and investigations of witchcraft and the furtive operations of occultists. In 1520 there was published a Latin text entitled Fustigationes, which involves references to love philtres. The author was a certain Grillandus, a Florentine and also a member of the Inquisition at Arezzo.
Through the centuries, there were sporadic appearances of pamphlets and miscellaneous pieces that had reference to amatory aids. For instance, Le Jardin d’Amour, published in 1798 by a certain Tansillo or Tanzillo.
Every century, every country, every religious sect, had its own monstrous obscenities, its peculiar orgiastic ceremonials, its gross and bestial manifestations, and its most unhallowed erotic permutations. Some of these phenomena were of a seclusive nature, confined to initiates only. Others, more liberated or more daring, were associated with royal courts, or temple worship, or even conventual life. Erotic acts, bestial performances, tribadism and fellatio and every other abnormality were all depicted in caves and church windows, woven in tapestries, or represented in ornamental furniture, etched in books, moulded in statuary.
The Middle Ages, in particular, were the milieu, but of course not exclusively so, of political cataclysms and internecine wars, of plagues and intrigues and famine, of splendor and tournaments, jousts and crusades, and also of servitude and witchcraft, gluttony and debauchery, monastic life and religious reforms, art and poetry and lewdness.
All through the ages, notably during these middle eras, this dichotomy was prevalent and manifest. And pervading and transcending all civic conditions, all national issues, was the erotic life of the teeming, inarticulate populace and the highly literate and cultured minorities: wanton prelates and easy princesses, libidinous serving maids and poetic gallants, romantic crusaders, lechers, perverts.
The history of these times is packed with religious lusts, with worship of the genitalia, with female devotees of Priapus, with amatory flagellations and erotic feasts, with sexuality rampant in full public view, with chastity belts and barbarous contraptions. The Latin chronicles and the Latin satirical writings, the Wandering Scholars’ songs and the anecdotes and tales that amused these centuries are filled with abhorrent nudist practices, with adultery and incest, with prostitution and unholy commerce of holy devotees, with rape and sodomy. We hear of the most unbridled, the most shameless doings from the chronicles of Godefroy and of Froissart, of Benevente and Grecourt. We read of obscene banquets under kingly sponsorship, of brothels under royal patronage, of public gymnastic performances of harlots, of the debaucheries of monks and canons and students, adventurers and courtiers. We read of a monastery dedicated to prostitution, of parades of harlots, of foul sexual privileges exercised by the lords of the manor, of the ius primae noctis and the droit de cuisse, and, in short, of an array, colossal in bulk and unspeakable in content, of every conceivable erotic fact.
Through the ages, the knowledge of sexual and amatory artifices, contraptions, inducements grew and multiplied in such variety, through legend and experiment, through the accretions of poetic myths and hearsay, that a voluminous corpus was achieved. It comprehended incantations and fantasies, rare prescriptions, crude operative techniques, formulas and incisions, superstitions and alchemical products, astrological cryptograms and Satanic supplications that were all assumed to be effective in guarding or in increasing amatory potency.
Sexual procedures of all types and at varying levels were particularly prevalent in the Middle Ages. In addition, the clergy, according to the testimony of contemporary songs and monastic chronicles and incidental references in drama and satire and history, were not altogether immune to such diversions. To promote asceticism, therefore, to diminish carnal lusts, various plants and drugs and other medicaments were employed in monasteries to produce the desired anaphrodisiac condition. Agnus castus, for example, which is now identified with the chaste-tree or Abraham’s balm, was credited with having decided cooling effects and eliminating physiological urgencies.
An ingenious device that resulted in stifling the amatory advances of a king is related in Boccaccio’s Decameron: The Fifth Story of the First Day. King Phillippe of France, learning of the beauty of the Marchioness of Monferrato, journeys to her domain, in the absence of the Marquis. He is invited to a banquet:
The ordinance of the repast and of the viands she reserved to herself alone and having forthright caused collect as many hens as were in the country, she bade her cooks dress various dishes of these alone for the royal table.
The king came at the appointed time and was received by the lady with great honor and rejoicing. When he beheld her, she seemed to him fair and noble and well-bred beyond that which he had conceived from the courtier’s words, whereat he marvelled exceedingly and commended her amain, waxing so much the hotter in his desire as he found the lady over-passing his foregone conceit of her. After he had taken somewhat of rest in chambers adorned to the utmost with all that pertaineth to the entertainment of such a king, the dinner hour being come, the king and the marchioness seated themselves at one table, whilst the rest, according to their quality, were honorably entertained at others. The king, being served with many dishes in succession, as well as with wines of the best and costliest, and to boot gazing with delight the while upon the lovely marchioness, was mightily pleased with his entertainment; but, after awhile, as the viands followed one upon another, he began somewhat to marvel, perceiving that, for all the diversity of the dishes, they were nevertheless of nought other than hens, and this although he knew the part where he was to be such as should abound in game of various kinds and although he had, by advising the lady in advance of his coming, given her time to send a-hunting. However, much as he might marvel at this, he chose not to take occasion of engaging her in parley thereof, otherwise than in the matter of her hens, and accordingly, turning to her with a merry air, ‘Madam,’ quoth he, ‘are hens only born in these parts, without ever a cock?’ The marchioness, who understood the king’s question excellent well, herseeming God had vouchsafed her, according to her wish, an oportune occasion of discovering her mind, turned to him and answered boldly, ‘Nay, my lord; but women, albeit in apparel and dignities they may differ somewhat from others, are natheless all of the same fashion here as elsewhere.’
The King, hearing this, right well apprehended the meaning of the banquet of hens and the virtue hidden in her speech and perceived that words would be wasted upon such a lady, and that violence was out of the question; wherefore, even as he had ill-advisedly taken fire for her, so now it behoved him sagely, for his own honor’s sake, stifle his ill-conceived passion.
The medieval love poem, usually sung to an accompaniment on the lyre or other musical instrument, was often, in spite of its superficially innocuous tone, full of amatory innuendoes and erotic provocations. The love song, in fact, was virtually an amatory philtre intended to set the listener afire, or to inspire the object of the implicit passion with an equal fervor, or to divert a passion in the direction of the songster. The concluding story of the fifth day, in Boccaccio’s Decameron, contains a song of this nature: