Cagliostro had a kind of counterpart in the arcane arts. Catherine La Voisin was a notorious French fortune-teller, as well as a reputed witch. For the most part, she was a dispenser of love philtres, and plied her sinister trade in low and high circles. In this capacity she was intimately associated with the obscene and erotic operations of Madame de Montespan. Madame de Montespan, mistress of King Louis XIV of France, reached a point where her amatory offerings no longer aroused the King. Steps had to be taken, urgently and effectively, to recover that affection. With the aid of Catherine La Voisin, she concocted love philtres. She participated in magical rites, in amatory Masses, and even in child sacrifice, to gain her passionate purpose. In this sinister machination she enlisted the support of a notorious Abbé Guibourg. His scatological and lascivious activities in this respect brought about his arrest, and his summary execution.
The love-potion, then, could be, potentially, a tremendously evil force, a malefic and fatal weapon, an instrument of ruin and death. But usually the potion was associated with soft and luxurious dalliance, with amorous whisperings, with marital exchanges and sophisticated deceits. So it was in Italy in particular. In the sixteenth century, many Jewesses dabbled in love potions and amatory charms. They practiced their skill in Rome itself, and acquired an established reputation as purveyors of these physiological stimuli. Ferdinand Gregorovius, who produced a monumental history of Rome, declares that Jewish women brewed love philtres in the dark of the night, for their languishing customers, the ladies of Rome.
Lippold, a Jewish financier of the Elector Joachim II of Brandenburg, who also belongs in the sixteenth century, was accused, among other charges based on magic practices, of dispensing recipes for the concoction of love philtres. He was brutally tortured: then executed in Berlin.
The medieval era was a period of absorption of the past, with occasional tentative gropings and some experimentation in new directions. In the erotic sphere, the Middle Ages adopted this antique heritage, at times moulded and modified it, and sometimes made use of it in new contexts. Thus there was in use an aromatic herb called popularly Sweet Flag. This was the plant known anciently as acorus calamus, that the Romans believed to be endowed with erotic stimulus. It was appropriately known to them by the alternate name of the plant of Venus.
In their tenebrous laboratories, equipped with weird paraphernalia, lit by the glow of furnace fire, the experimenting alchemists busied themselves with their apparatus. On tables and benches stood, in confused array, retorts of fantastic shape, flasks and tubes, alembics and phials containing strange viscous multi-colored fluids, fungus growths, particles of obscene matter, unnameable secretions. Some liquids, under the influence of tiny flames, hissed and spluttered with cunning animation. All these brews were undergoing action by fire and intermingling of chemicals, were being forced into mutations and directions for horrendous ends: and, dominantly among these objectives, was the illusive mutation into gold, but also the discovery of the source of being, the elixir of life, the rejuvenating creative essence that would promote youthfulness and vigor, passion and potency.
The medieval occultist and the alchemist did not always remain, as tradition believed, secluded in their own ivory tower, or rather in their laboratories. In many senses, they were decided realists, and they made profitable use of their knowledge and experimentations in the direction of astrological horoscopes, fortune-telling, and the preparation of philtres. There was, particularly, a potion in great demand among amorous but disappointed swains of every degree and rank. It was, according to general hearsay, a beverage whose basic ingredient was gold. The preparation was consumed daily, over a space of time, as a kind of amatory potable gold.
Many types of potions were resorted to in the Middle Ages. Some acted as physiological excitants, but involved great circumspection in securing the ingredients. These ingredients were often organic fragments: hair of the beloved one obtained surreptitiously. Or nail parings. Or a shred torn from an intimately worn garment. Such items were then burned, and, when reduced to ashes, mixed with wine and used as a philtre.
In other cases, all sorts of putatively effective concoctions, never of course analyzed as to the contents by the passionate pursuer, were involved. They were freely sold in the market towns of medieval Europe, in battlemented castles, in remote hamlets. They were brought as elixirs by returning travelers from distant countries, and were eagerly purchased in the ports and capitals of the continent. Especially when these travelers reinforced their importations with tales and anecdotes that testified to the amazing virtues of their brews.