In Hindu mythology, there are instances of women bathing in the holy River Ganges and losing their sterility. So in the aboriginal myths of Australia. In the Fiji islands barren women bathe in the river and then take a drink of saffron and carob bean.
A similar tradition lingers in China, in the history of the Manchus. The lotus often appeared in their legends as a kind of confirmatory aid. In Egypt, in fact, the lotus was known as the wife of the Nile.
In both the West and the Orient, the personal will to be admired or loved is believed to be instrumental, in a perceptible degree, in producing a corresponding impact on the object of the desire. Various procedures are specified, each having its own effective possibilities. An offering of a bouquet of red flowers, breathed upon three times by the amorous giver, may prove highly favorable to his pursuit. Or a musical serenade, equally in vogue in the Latin countries, in medieval Europe, and in the Middle East.
CHAPTER VIII INGREDIENTS OF POTIONS. RECIPES. ANECDOTES.
What were the elements that, in combination, constituted the potion? Was there a formal, hieratic prescription for its composition, faithfully followed, scrupulously administered, uniformly conclusive? Or was it a more or less haphazard matter of collecting various essences and grasses, roots and drugs and far-sought items, and then hopefully thrusting them upon the tremulous suppliant, the desperate lover, the urgent princeling or vagrant poet? The ancients, both in the Mediterranean area and in the far-flung Asian territories, used virtually the same species of ingredients, the same or analogous roots and extracts, enwrapped, to strengthen the efficacy, in goetic chants, in awesome invocations, supplications, persistent pleas, and even menaces.
Sometimes the ingredients were abominable and repulsive in character, for all growing and living things were grist to the occultist’s mill. Animal and human excreta and genitalia were frequently brought under contribution. Not rarely, exotic spices were garnered: or leaves from trees that grew in distant regions: or objects otherwise difficult to obtain? such as the hair, or nail parings, or even more intimate and less mentionable items from the human body. The traditions associated with the ingredients were manifestly read and studied and pondered over and memorized through the ages, and subsequently transmitted to later centuries. So that by the Middle Ages there had been accumulated an immense reservoir of available constituents: human and animal matter, herbs, genitalia, liquefied elements, excrement of ox and pig, of wolf, goat, dog, and goose, of sheep, hen, mice, pigeon, and cow. To ensure the validity of the potion, there would be a bewitchment of the entire compound, accompanied by certain formal rituals. Formulas would be inscribed on certain phials and objects. Frog’s bones were popular in this regard. The mandrake, that mystic root that was associated with sinister human origins and characteristics, the plant that was reputedly endowed with male and female properties, was a popular ingredient in the love potion. Bryony was long used for the purpose, and, in later days, tobacco as well. Entrails of animals were no rarity. The more repellent the object, the more salacious and lewd and priapic would be the effect. For the gasping, excited recipient, nothing was too foul, nothing too obnoxious, nothing too horrendous. What did matter was its aphrodisiac value. Hence the powdered heart of a roasted humming bird had its potency. Or the liver of a sparrow. The kidney of a hare was a frequent addition to the sum total of decayed and decaying tissue. Or the womb of a swallow, that itself required minute preparation, was a prompt aid. Human blood came into the picture, and the human heart and the fingers, as well as viscera, excrement, and urine, brain and skin and marrow. Even the Roman poets give a literary shudder at the mention, and in the medieval chroniclers and encyclopedists there is equally a sense of repulsion yet attraction. For love and passion generated from death and offal, and desire sprang from decay. Sappho, that ancient Greek poetess of Lesbos, knew the supremacy of this passion. She called Aphrodite deathless, because love and life are co-eval and co-existent. The sweetest thing of all, she declares in one of her pieces, is to find one’s lover. Ages later, Titus Lucretius Carus, the Roman Epicurean poet who, in the first century B.C., produced that remarkable, profound epic, _De Rerum Natura_, The Nature of Things, begins his poem with an invocation to fostering Venus, the delight of men and of gods.