All kinds of foods have in the course of history been subjected to scrutiny and experiment for the purpose of extracting therefrom any indications of amatory incitements. Thus, out of the welter of magic undercurrents and legendary beliefs, superstitious rites and alchemical offerings, there arose a body of miscellaneous knowledge, largely orally transmitted but in time consolidated into a permanently durable form, dealing with periapts and panaceas that would bring back or conserve manly vigor and genesiac capacities.
Among such potential means were anchovies, credited with provoking lust, onion soup and herring roe, milk pudding. Angel water also was so considered. It was shaken together with rose water, myrtle water, orange flower water, distilled spirit of musk, and spirit of ambergris. To the genitalia of the stag were attributed amatory qualities. Rockets, cakes and pastries of phallic and genital design, chocolate and ices, pills compounded of vegetable extracts, burgundy and richly garnished game came under the same energizing category.
In South East Asia, particularly in what was formerly Cambodia, annual spring festivals were held during which a gigantic lingam was carried processionally through the streets. At the ghats in the holy cities of India, notably at Benares, the sacred lingam was displayed publicly by the Brahmin priests. Around these symbols clustered Hindu women on pilgrimage, wreathing the phallic shape in flowers, smearing it with ghee. And among the throngs strode the priests, bearing phallic forms for the adoration and prostration of the people. Temple girls, bedecked with tinkling anklets, and with beringed fingers, advanced, swaying and writhing voluptuously. In similar ceremonies there was food to be consumed, and drink flowed; followed, on the part of the initiates, by a general indiscriminate promiscuity that was intended to represent spiritual identification with the Hindu deities. The erotic urgencies never rested, never rest: and the act becomes a sublimation.
The phallic cult, as the basic recognition of the creative potency, is pervasively manifest, in every continent, throughout all distinctions of society. In New Guinea, huts are adorned with a phallus. In the South Sea Islands huge monolithic columns testify to the indigenous worship of the generative force. In some areas of Arabia tombs are adorned with the phallus and are treated with sacrosanct adoration by the women. The Druses, in ceremonial chants at night, pay honor and homage to the yoni, and particularly to the consummation on the sacred Friday, as enjoined by Islam. In Tahiti, secret rites are held, in a corresponding sense, in honor of the physiological act.
Greece had its processional mystai, male and female votaries of Bacchus, leading asses or goats, while young maids carried baskets of first-fruits and genital-shaped cakes. And a sequence of men, their heads wreathed in ivy or acanthus, bore a fig-wood triple phallus of the god.
From Phrygia the cult had anciently spread to Etruria, where the obscene deity, according to Augustine and Arnobius, was the phallic Mutunus with his consort Mutuna.
From Etruria the cult extended riotously to Rome and its far-flung frontiers, from Lambaesis to Dacia, from Bithynia to Pannonia.