Woman became so masterful, so pervasively dominant in her relations with her masculine counterpart, that she came to reflect man’s primary physiological desire. She became equated with erotic passion and fulfillment, and her urgency grew so intense that all roads were directed toward her as the ultimate pleasure, the sensual summum bonum. She was in the medieval dialectical sense, matter in actu. And when the physiological and amatory capacities of the male became, through excessive practice or through incidental incapacities or aberrations and indiscretions, markedly weakened and deficient, there was instant and frantic resort to any means, to all means, whereby this defect or incapacity might be corrected or possibly completely remedied. Hence the febrile, the universal quest, in every land and at all cultural levels, for aids and persuasive spells and secret incantations, thaumaturgic formulas and brews, elixirs and anticipated panaceas. * * * * * Springs, rivers, lakes, wells, and fountains have had at various times a kind of miraculous or thaumaturgic repute as an efficacious amatory stimulant. The Khirgiz of Central Asia, for instance, have a legend that a princess, after bathing in a sacred lake, became enceinte. Waters may thus be fruitful and fecundating. Aristotle himself relates that a pool had the same effect on a bathing woman. In the Middle Ages, the philosopher and occultist Albertus Magnus describes similar instances and similar potencies. In India, barren women bathed in a sacred well. Similarly with the waters of Sinuessa in Greece. Springs in Germany and Morocco and in France were likewise venerated for their traditional erotic efficacy. In Hindu mythology, there are instances of women bathing in the holy River Ganges and losing their sterility. So in the aboriginal myths of Australia. In the Fiji islands barren women bathe in the river and then take a drink of saffron and carob bean. A similar tradition lingers in China, in the history of the Manchus. The lotus often appeared in their legends as a kind of confirmatory aid. In Egypt, in fact, the lotus was known as the wife of the Nile. In both the West and the Orient, the personal will to be admired or loved is believed to be instrumental, in a perceptible degree, in producing a corresponding impact on the object of the desire. Various procedures are specified, each having its own effective possibilities. An offering of a bouquet of red flowers, breathed upon three times by the amorous giver, may prove highly favorable to his pursuit. Or a musical serenade, equally in vogue in the Latin countries, in medieval Europe, and in the Middle East. CHAPTER VIII INGREDIENTS OF POTIONS. RECIPES. ANECDOTES. _Ingredients_