Some of these mystic, occult unions, on the other hand, were associated with beneficent spirits, with angelic embodiments, saints, and similar personalities.
In the malefic traditions of the Black Arts and demoniac relationships, there was widespread credence in intercourse between witches and the members of the Satanic legions, between sorceresses and Satan himself, and between the practitioners of magic and all kinds of bestial and obscene creatures. The medieval demonographers are soberly voluble in recounting many such instances. They chronicle, with precise supporting confirmatory testimony, tales that brought the participants, the old and the young women so accused of diabolic intimacies, to trial, to torture, and finally to the gallows.
Ready and voluminous evidence comes from Guazzo and Johannes Anania and Jean Bodin, from Henri Boguet and Delrio, from Tartarotti, Stridtbeckh, Sinistrari and Ricardus, Molitor, de L’Ancre, Elich, and Daugis.
At the Sabbats, the assemblies of witches and Satanic forces, there were, according to the medieval chroniclers and the old European folk traditions, frantic performances of the most obscene nature, monstrous rituals, weird banquets, culminating in lewd orgies characterized, according to the grave testimonies of the demonographers, by copulation of witches and materialized demoniac spirits.
The Aphroditic force and influence are all-pervasive. Hence, in the field of astrological lore, Venus represents love, in its most extended sense, normal, illicit, and aberrational. Certain symbols, creatures, forms are regularly associated with her functions. The lubricities of the goat and the bull are under her sway, while, botanically, many plants, among them vervain and myrtle, are endowed with aphrodisiac qualities.
CHAPTER X
MODERN TIMES
Eros is triumphant in the twentieth century, in every social frame, in every milieu, and in every country. Henri Bergson, the French philosopher who is associated with the concept of l’élan vital—the vital urge, or, as George Bernard Shaw termed it, the life force, declared that this twentieth century has become aphrodisiac.
The love-potion is not a matter of academic history only: it is still flourishing. It still has its devotees. It is still encountered in obscure places, where furtive secrecy is of the essence of the amatory preparations. In the folk mind in particular the love-potion can still be efficacious, sometimes grim in its attendant effects, but unquestionably an accepted and often employed means of directing erotic feelings, imposing amatory impulses, on a beloved victim, on the indifferent libertine, on the wayward and flighty girl.
Ottokar Nemecek in his Die Wertschätzung der Jungfräulichkeit (Verlag A. Sexl. Vienna, 1953) gives interesting instances of erotic practices, rituals, religious ceremonials, culled from many ethnic groups. In Fernando Po, for example, a prayer is offered: May the woman and the man become as erotically entwined as the creepers in the forest entwine around the tree trunks.