The Greek writer Lucian’s Lover of Lies consists of a collection of sketches on various contemporary superstitions and practices. There are descriptions of magic statues endowed with animation, awesome apparitions, and also charms for bringing back a lover who has strayed.
The River Scamander, in Greece, was reputed to be such a potent amatory stimulus that maidens hopefully bathed in its waters. On one occasion, according to the testimony of the orator Aeschines, the beautiful Callirhoë, on her way to bathing in the sacred Scamander, was met by a young man who represented himself as an aide to the river god. The young man then substituted himself for the god and performed his divine function.
The medieval demonographer Martin Delrio, in his Disquisitionum Magicarum Libri Sex, discusses love charms, brews of all kinds, and other amatory inducements used by practitioners in the Black Arts. He mentions formulas and incantations, spells and alluring chants such as the seductive croonings of the ancient sirens, as well as the hypnotic music produced by Orpheus: also concoctions compounded of viscera and blood and other more intimate secretions.
Amatory inducements may be merely sensuous, or bodily proximity, as in dancing. Or excitation may be provoked by listening to an appealing voice, or visually observing a theatrical spectacle. Or recalling a fragment of song, a forgotten melody.
Particularly in the Orient, amatory preparations often run the gamut from oddities or puerilities to items that are monstrous in themselves, or so rare as to preclude the possibility of securing them: as, the scale of a tortoise, or the secretions of a stag, or a corpse, or a hyena’s brains or whiskers.
Yet, in the East, these ingredients might well be furtively whispered to the love-sick suppliant by some aged crone who is the repository of legendary remedies, or by an obscure apothecary, whose pharmacopoeia is medieval, or by some wandering minstrel or trader.