Produced by Bryan Ness and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from scanned images of public domain material from the Google Print project.) By Mr. Saltus MARY MAGDALEN THE POMPS OF SATAN IMPERIAL PURPLE THE ANATOMY OF NEGATION THE PERFUME OF EROS VANITY SQUARE HISTORIA AMORIS _A History of Love Ancient and Modern_ _By_ EDGAR SALTUS NEW YORK MITCHELL KENNERLEY MCMVI _Copyright 1906 By EDGAR SALTUS_ HISTORIA AMORIS PART ONE I Super Flumina Babylonis 1 II The Curtains of Solomon 10 III Aphrodite Urania 28 IV Sappho 41 V The Age of Aspasia 53 VI The Banquet 65 VII Roma-Amor 75 VIII Antony and Cleopatra 87 IX The Imperial Orgy 97 X Finis Amoris 110 PART TWO I The Cloister and the Heart 125 II The Pursuivants of Love 138 III The Parliaments of Joy 150 IV The Doctors of the Gay Science 164 V The Apotheosis 177 VI Bluebeard 191 VII The Renaissance 198 VIII Love in the Seventeenth Century 213 IX Love in the Eighteenth Century 237 X The Law of Attraction 251 HISTORIA AMORIS _Part One_ PART I I SUPER FLUMINA BABYLONIS The first created thing was light. Then life came, then death. In between was fear. But not love. Love was absent. In Eden there was none. Adam and Eve emerged there adult. The phases of the delicate fever which others in paradise since have experienced, left them unaffected. Instead of the reluctances and attractions, the hesitancies and aspirations, the preliminary and common conflagrations which are the beginnings, as they are also the sacraments, of love, abruptly they were one. They were married before they were mated. The union, entirely allegoric--a Persian conceit--differed, otherwise, only in the poetry of the accessories from that which elsewhere actually occurred. Primitive man was necessarily speechless, probably simian, and certainly hideous. Women, if possible more hideous still, were joined by him momentarily and immediately forgot. Ultimately, into the desolate poverty of the rudimentary brain there crept a novelty. The novelty was an idea. Women were detained, kept in lairs, made to serve there. Further novelties ensuing, creatures that had learned from birds to talk passed from animality. Subsequent progress originated in a theory that they were very clearly entitled to whatever was not taken away from them. From that theory all institutions proceed, primarily that of family.