In Ethiopia a phallic provocation was the wearing on the head of a band to which a horn was attached. Similarly among many African tribes, where the chief wore a phallus-crown with the same intention. As in Hellenic antiquity, in ancient India and in modern India also, the phallus is the symbol of might, of masculine sovereignty, of cosmic creativeness.
Such customs and rites, such implicit amatory instigations, have not died out. They appear in many forms and guises, sometimes decorative, on other occasions in fanciful culinary shapes. Amulets and figures in phallic and genital form were sold, as late as 1894, in the shops of Tiflis, in Caucasia, and in the United States migrants from the Central European countries still reproduce, in their bake shops, festive genital formations.
Traditional potions, aphrodisiacs, and similar means of arousing genital impulses are in use even at the present time. Carrots, for instance, were long listed by the Arabs as a stimulant. In medieval Spain they were commonly consumed for such a purpose. And in the United States carrots are still reputed to have a marked erotic potency.
Current magazines of the more popular sort, contemporary drug stores have their amatory allurements. Some periodicals advertise exotic perfumes, sultry essences, seductive cosmetics and similar feminine accessories, or insidious unguents and lotions, whose avowed purpose is to attract men in an amorous direction. In the drug stores, hormones and gland extracts, transplantations and rejuvenative manipulations and operations are publicized for similar purposes.
Among some primitive tribal communities in New Guinea, powerful love charms take the form of genital secretions. Such secretions are then used in magic ceremonials affecting both man and beast: the underlying intent being procreational encouragement.
Virility and its concomitants have no frontiers, no temporal restrictions. In Central India, in areas that have not yet been significantly affected by the encroachments of modern ways and procedures, virility has not become a tribal or personal problem. It is so normal, in fact, and sexual indulgence is so released from emotional or social inhibitions and taboos that erotic encouragement in the shape of unguents, liquids, potions is rare: although there is, as a prelude to erotic excitations, a preliminary mamillary exercise.