Love Potions through the Ages (Illustrated)

Love Potions through the Ages
A Study of Amatory Devices and Mores
Author: Harry E. Wedeck
Copyright Status: Public Domain

Table of Contents
LOVE POTIONS THROUGH THE AGES A Study of Amatory Devices and Mores
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I ANTIQUITY
CHAPTER II GREEK
Plato
Dioscorides
Nonnus
CHAPTER III ROMANS
Ovid
CHAPTER IV ORIENT
CHAPTER V INDIA
CHAPTER VI VARIETIES AND OCCASIONS OF POTIONS
CHAPTER VII POTENCY OF PHILTRES
CHAPTER VIII INGREDIENTS OF POTIONS. RECIPES. ANECDOTES.
Ingredients
CHAPTER IX MIDDLE AGES AND LATER
Clauder
CHAPTER X MODERN TIMES
SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY

This is a study of love potions and a survey of amatory mores through the ages. To recover or ensure physiological virility, man has frantically searched for and contrived the most amazing aids to amatory capacity. In particular, he has devised the philtre or love potion. And he has used such concoctions in various forms in all ages, in every country from Babylon to Spain, and in Arabia as well as in China. This book surveys this strange field and highlights its peculiarities and its fantasies, as well as its often warranted validity.

The amatory motif is pervasive, timeless, and universal. In some of its phases and manifestations, it has presented age-old provocations and, not infrequently, problems that are still unresolved.
Among such problems are involved the faculty of physiological potency, the urge to attract amorously, and, conversely, the problem of preventing such attraction in a designated instance, or of diverting it to another objective.
That, in brief, is the essence of the material means of effecting such a realization. In its various mutations, its protean diversities, it is the love-potion, the philtre, the mystic concoction that, once quaffed, will instill love and passion and desire and lust, that will replenish erotic inadequacies, that will awaken the ancient fons vitae, the symbol of animate being, the source, as the antique Hellenes sensed and exemplified, of all cosmic creation, of the totality of living generation.
The potion, then, is at least a hypothetically efficacious instrument for securing and preserving the amorous interests of the desired object. It also serves as an apotropaic device for diverting misplaced love, as the agent sees it, and redirecting it to the proper and preferred channel.
The actual means for the fulfillment of these erotic purposes vary with the ages, with ethnic groups and demographic alignments, with legendary and folk traditions and mores, with the disparate levels of the culture of a specific region. They present variations and adaptations in correspondence with climatic and epichorial conditions. But they retain the essentially common characteristic, the unchanging property, of attempting to shape and mold the amatory esurgences, in whatever degree, and whether transitory or of more enduring permanence, by impersonal, palpable, mechanistic and visual means.
It should be observed, as a terminus a quo, that the term philtre itself stems from the Greek philtron, a love-potion (from philein, to love, and Tron, an instrumental suffix). It means, then, a love-charm.
The term potion is derived immediately from the Latin potio, a draught, whether of medicine or even of poison. The ultimate source is the Greek photos, a drink. In a general sense, therefore, a love philter or potion is a concoction, usually liquid in form, but not necessarily so, intended to produce or promote amatory sensibilities. In a wide and comprehensive denotation, the philtre will include any object or charm or periapt that serves the same erotic purpose.
This present survey touches on the use of the potion in the course of the centuries, in varying circumstances and disparate countries: on the fantastic factors that composed the f

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