Certain animals, in classical and Oriental mythology, were associated with erotic symbolism. This was the case with the stag, the ass, the bull, the camel, the deer, the mare. During a festival in honor of Dionysus, god of wine and in general of fertility, Priapus, the god who represented the active male principle, was on the point of exercising his potency with the nymph Lotis. At the crucial moment, however, an ass brayed, and saved Lotis. As a consequence, the ass was doomed to become a sacrificial victim to Priapus. * * * * * Women were more rarely involved in experimenting with invigorating agents. One woman, however, has gained historical notoriety and infamy in this respect. She was the Countess Elizabeth Bathory, a seventeenth century Hungarian. In her passion for recovering her youthful energy, she was said to have strangled some eighty peasant girls and to have bathed in their blood. Retribution overtook her in the act, and she was sentenced to imprisonment for life. * * * * * Flagellation, as an erotic symbol, was known to the ancients and was frequently practiced in the Middle Ages. Galen of Pergamum, the Greek gladiator-physician who flourished in the second century A.D. under the Roman Emperors, asserts that slave merchants used this practice in order to make their slaves more appealing to prospective buyers. * * * * * Many historical personalities have been addicted to flagellation for their own purposes. Cornelius Gallus, administrator of the Roman province of Egypt and a friend of the Roman epic poet Vergil, resorted to scourging for the purpose of amatory excitation. One Italian, a noted libertine of the times, had the scourge soaked in vinegar, to give the lashes greater pungency. There is a strong probability that Abelard also used flagellation. For he declares, addressing Héloise: Verbera quandoque dabat amor non furor, gratia non ira, quae omnium unguentorum suavitatem transcenderent. Again, he reminds her of his own lascivious and libidinous ways: With threats and scourges I often compelled thee who wast, by nature, a weaker vessel, to comply, notwithstanding thy unwillingness and remonstrances. Tamerlane, the Asiatic master of the universe, the subject too of one of Christopher Marlowe’s tremendous dramas, was both a flagellant and a monorchis. Finally, Jean Jacques Rousseau, in his Confessions, acknowledges his condition: I had discovered in pain, even in shame, a mixture of sensuality that left me with a greater desire, rather than a fear, of experiencing it again. * * * * *