CHAPTER VII
POTENCY OF PHILTRES
The potion is primarily the instrument of lust. Lust is the universal driving force, the cosmic mainspring. The pudenda muliebria, states the Bible, are among the insatiable things on this earth. Plato, the Greek philosopher, in his dialogue entitled Timaeus, confirms this eternally unappeased genital passion:
In men the organ of generation, becoming rebellious and masterful, like an animal disobedient to reason, and maddened with the sting of lust, seeks to gain absolute sway; and the same is the case with the so-called womb or matrix of women; the animal within them is desirous of procreating children, and when remaining unfruitful long beyond the proper time, gets discontented and angry, and wandering in every direction through the body, closes up the passages of breath, and, by obstructing respiration, drives them to extremity, causing all varieties of disease, until at length the desire and love of the man and the woman bringing them together and as it were plucking the fruit from the trees, sow in the womb, as in a field, animals unseen by reason of their smallness and without form; these again are separated and matured within; they are then finally brought out into the light, and thus the generation of animals is completed.
Of all potions, satyrion is associated, in legend and mythology, with the most numerous and consecutive effects. There was a story of an oriental king. It is related in Book 9 of the Enquiry into Plants, by Theophrastus, who flourished in the third century B.C. The king had sent a gift of satyrion to Antiochus, ruler of Syria. The slave-messenger who carried the plant was himself so affected by it that he performed seventy coital operations in succession.
In respect of this same root there was another anecdote about a certain Proculus. After drinking a satyrion concoction, Proculus performed on one hundred women in fifteen days.
Wines, liqueurs, and in general all kinds of spirits are, both in fictional contexts and in the chronicles of the eighteenth century, considered as salacious tonics, and were so used specifically. Even an occasional drink of wine had an erotic repute.
In the salacious and scatological novels of the Marquis de Sade, especially in Justine and in Les 120 Journées de Sodome, food is repeatedly stressed as immediately contributory to high amatory potency. Repletion, it appears, corresponds directly to amatory responses. De Sade describes, in lavish and appreciative detail, with a kind of personal gusto and even participation, dinner after dinner, in which courses follow each other in almost numberless and uninterrupted sequence: roasts of all varieties, game in season, and also out of season, hors d’oeuvre, pastries of fantastic shape and ingredients, ices and chocolates. Each course is accompanied with appropriate wines and brandies. Rhenish and Greek and Italian vintages, burgundy and champagne, tokay and madeira.