As an erotic performance, and, notably, as a means of curing sterility in women, certain practices associated with the phallic symbol were in force in many countries, in all ages. The women of Brittany practiced phallic rites for centuries, in order to end their sterility. In one town a public phallic figure was often the scene of a peculiar act. The women gathered some of the dust at the base of the image and swallowed it, anticipating, through this form of sympathetic symbolism, the favorable outcome of the priapic implications.
There was an old legend that King Philip of Macedon had been bewitched by a Thessalian maiden who had used philtres to effect her passionate purpose. When Olympias, the Queen, observed the girl’s beauty and breeding and deportment, she declared that these qualities alone were the philtres that had ensnared King Philip.
Antiquity consistently associated sexual performances with sacred and divine rituals. So with the ancient Canaanites. The Hebraic tribes that lived in contiguous regions adopted this practice. They cohabited with the women of Shittim, and associated with the daughters of Moab. They went even further, and did obeisance to the gods of their neighbors, particularly to the god Baal-peor. The full text of this episode appears in Numbers 25, verses 1–3.
There was so much rivalry among the mistresses of King Louis XV of France that each one resorted to the most extreme means to hold his affection, or to regain his love. Madame de Pompadour, for example, used a tincture of cantharides. Cantharides is the beetle Mylabris or Lytta Vesicatoria. The active principle of this insect is a white powder called cantharidine: used as an amatory stimulant, but dangerous, and, when taken internally, fatal to the victim.
For Madame de Pompadour, however, and for many personalities notorious in history for their ruthless determination, there was the old but still meaningful adage about fairness in war and in love.
It is a popular belief that castration eliminates all amatory inclination as well as capacity. The Greek author of the encyclopedic Banquet of the Philosophers, however, Athenaeus, states that the Medes practiced this operation with their neighbors, for the purpose of arousing lustful excitations.