It is little wonder they excited hatred. The poculum amatorium or love philtre of the Romans, and the philtron of the Greeks, were venerated with superstitious awe in early times. They became used to such an extent by the former nation under the first emperors, that a decree was promulgated under the Roman criminal law whereby love philtres were deemed as poison, and the punishment inflicted on those using them was very severe. Hairs from a wolf’s tail, the bones of the left side of a toad which had been eaten by ants (those of the right side were used to cause hatred), the blood of pigeons, skeletons of snakes, the entrails of animals, and other equally disgusting things, were included as ingredients in Roman love philtres.
Pliny states, that there were also philtres for quenching love. Thus, “if a nest of young swallows is placed in a box and buried, on being dug up after a few days it will be found that some of the birds have died with their beaks closed, while others die as if gasping for breath”. The latter were used for exciting love, and the former for producing the opposite effect.
Horace recommends a bone torn from a hungry and voracious dog, and Virgil describes a complete apparatus wherewith a maiden seeks to recover the affections of a faithless lover.
The early Greek and Roman magicians used “hippomanes,” which was the lump of flesh found in the head of a colt newly foaled, as an ingredient in their philtres.
About the sixteenth century philtres came to be compounded and sold by the apothecaries, who doubtless derived from them a lucrative profit. Favourite ingredients with these later practitioners were mandragora, cantharides, and vervain, which were supposed to have Satanic properties. They were mixed with other herbs said to have an aphrodisiac effect; also man’s gall, the eyes of a black cat, and the blood of a lapwing, bat, or goat.
In Gay’s Shepherds’ Week reference is thus made to love philtres:—
“Strait to the ’pothecary’s shop I went,
And in love powder all my money spent;
Behap what will next Sunday after prayers
When to the alehouse Lubberkin repairs,
These flies into his mug I’ll throw,
And soon the swain with fervent love shall glow”.
“Botanomancy,” Ferrand states, “which is done by the noise or crackling that kneeholme, box, or bay leaves make when they are crushed betwixt one’s hands or cast into the fire, was of old in use among the pagans, who were wont to bruise poppy flowers betwixt their hands, and by this means thinking to know their loves.”
A CHARME OR AN ALLAY FOR LOVE.
“If so be a toad be laid
In a sheepskin newly flaid,
And that ty’d to man ’twill sever
Him and his affections ever.”—Herrick’s Hesperides.