The phallic cult, as the basic recognition of the creative potency, is pervasively manifest, in every continent, throughout all distinctions of society. In New Guinea, huts are adorned with a phallus. In the South Sea Islands huge monolithic columns testify to the indigenous worship of the generative force. In some areas of Arabia tombs are adorned with the phallus and are treated with sacrosanct adoration by the women. The Druses, in ceremonial chants at night, pay honor and homage to the yoni, and particularly to the consummation on the sacred Friday, as enjoined by Islam. In Tahiti, secret rites are held, in a corresponding sense, in honor of the physiological act. Greece had its processional mystai, male and female votaries of Bacchus, leading asses or goats, while young maids carried baskets of first-fruits and genital-shaped cakes. And a sequence of men, their heads wreathed in ivy or acanthus, bore a fig-wood triple phallus of the god. From Phrygia the cult had anciently spread to Etruria, where the obscene deity, according to Augustine and Arnobius, was the phallic Mutunus with his consort Mutuna. From Etruria the cult extended riotously to Rome and its far-flung frontiers, from Lambaesis to Dacia, from Bithynia to Pannonia. CHAPTER VII POTENCY OF PHILTRES The potion is primarily the instrument of lust. Lust is the universal driving force, the cosmic mainspring. The pudenda muliebria, states the Bible, are among the insatiable things on this earth. Plato, the Greek philosopher, in his dialogue entitled _Timaeus_, confirms this eternally unappeased genital passion: In men the organ of generation, becoming rebellious and masterful, like an animal disobedient to reason, and maddened with the sting of lust, seeks to gain absolute sway; and the same is the case with the so-called womb or matrix of women; the animal within them is desirous of procreating children, and when remaining unfruitful long beyond the proper time, gets discontented and angry, and wandering in every direction through the body, closes up the passages of breath, and, by obstructing respiration, drives them to extremity, causing all varieties of disease, until at length the desire and love of the man and the woman bringing them together and as it were plucking the fruit from the trees, sow in the womb, as in a field, animals unseen by reason of their smallness and without form; these again are separated and matured within; they are then finally brought out into the light, and thus the generation of animals is completed. * * * * *