Procure a new chopper, two new knives, a new porcelain bowl, a new, well rinsed bottle, a black glass, a carafe of cold water, a stick of new wax, a seal, a mortar, and a new cork.
At midnight, make the sign of the cross three times. Then put the snake’s head in the mortar with the leaves and flowers crushed into a paste. Heap up into a consistent mixture. Put the mortar on the flame until the contents are dry: then pulverize, while the mortar is heating.
With the new knives, let six drops of your blood fall into the cup: add water, pour the contents of the mortar into the cup, stir, and boil. Take three of your hairs, calcine them and throw into the cup. Do likewise with the parchment and the bag. Pour into the bottle, add water until it overflows. Cork it and seal it, place it in the bed, put out the light, pray and go to sleep.
After three days, after leaving it in the dark, by the window, on the third midnight the brew will be ready. Five drops for men, three for women, mixed with drink or food.
This elixir was reputed to be highly effective.
CHAPTER IX
MIDDLE AGES AND LATER
In the earlier Christian centuries, misogynistic attitudes were markedly prevalent, especially among the dogmatizing Church Fathers, and despite the traditions of the agape. Clemens and Ambrose, Tertullian and Athanasius were impassioned and vociferous, both in their oral denunciations, and in their written invectives against the essentially evil and malefic nature of woman.
Hence sexual love was anathema to them: and even marriage, grudgingly conceded but rarely accepted, was an object of horrified scorn. In consequence, it was not surprising that sexual interests and activities should go underground, as it were, and that amatory aids and encouragements likewise developed their secretive hiding places, their esoteric emporia, their identifiable but undisclosed havens.
The result was that, as the Middle Ages advanced, two basic views appeared to come into force. Laws that governed the marriage ceremonial and its consequent domestic involvements and possessive obligations. And laws that related to love as such, to the amor naturalis, as defined by St. Thomas Aquinas, both in its romantic sense as a kind of amatory but undefined ideal, and in its sexual implications that reached as far as adultery, under certain subdued, well-controlled, and unpublicized circumstances.
All these occasions created a hungry, frantic demand for philtres and phials and nostrums of all varieties, of all degrees of efficacy. They bloomed upon the markets, and gave employment and a vast impetus to quacks and adventurers, to alchemists and beldams, in furnishing the tantalizing apparatus of love.