A very popular pill, whose composition, however, is not revealed to the reader, appears again and again in the long picaresque, erotic Chinese novel entitled Chin P’ing Mei. One of the characters, a monk, recommends to the adventurous hero that a certain pill, to be taken in a drop of spirits, has remarkable potency, which is specified numerically and in the degree of its voluptuousness. The erotic effects, in fact, are described by the monk in verse. The pill, yellow in hue, and ovoid in shape, is of the utmost efficacy, over a long expanse of days, the masculine vigor, described generously and enticingly, increasing with each successive day and each amatory encounter.
From a genital gland of the musk-deer and also of a species of goat that thrives in Tartary, a bitter, volatile substance is extracted, that is termed musk. In the Orient, notably in Tibet and in Iran, musk has been in use, in culinary preparations, for its assumed erotic virtues.
Musk, in fact, is pervasively associated with amatory sensations. To the ideal woman, according to Hindu erotology, whose pulchritude and appeal are beyond criticism, clings the aroma of musk, elusive, tantalizing.
Musk has long been involved in erotic practices, and its virtue in this direction has been repeatedly emphasized in amatory manuals, particularly among the Arabs. Even in tales and legends, in poetry and in chronicles, the perfume of musk and its marked allure play no small part in the creation of romantic episodes.
The tradition of musk as an amatory agent, arousing mental and sensual erotic images and inclinations, lingers on into contemporary times. In a popular mystery tale, The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu, by Sax Rohmer, the plot centres around a sinister, super-intelligent Oriental operator named Dr. Fu-Manchu. One of his hirelings is the woman called Kâramanèh. Her nearness is sensed by the narrator, a certain Dr. Petrie. He detects the perfume, which ‘like a breath of musk, spoke of the Orient.’ It seemed to intoxicate the narrator, disturbing his rational faculties, suggesting the beauty of the villainous Kâramanèh.
In the inexhaustible richness of world literature, in every country and in every century, there are texts, memoirs, guides, novels, dramas, poetry, sagas and legends that are devoted largely, occasionally exclusively, to the amatory theme: from the Dialogues of Luisa Sigea to Pietro Aretino’s lascivious sonnets, from the amatory epistles of Alciphron to the lush and fantastic orgiastic extravagances of the Marquis de Sade.
Among all this heterogeneous variety of treatment, viewpoint, and exposition, there is the almost universally accepted standard text, originally produced in Sanskrit by Vatsyayana, of the Kama Sutra, the Apothegms on Love, the essence of amatory science, the distillations of erotic precepts.