Cagliostro had a kind of counterpart in the arcane arts. Catherine La Voisin was a notorious French fortune-teller, as well as a reputed witch. For the most part, she was a dispenser of love philtres, and plied her sinister trade in low and high circles. In this capacity she was intimately associated with the obscene and erotic operations of Madame de Montespan. Madame de Montespan, mistress of King Louis XIV of France, reached a point where her amatory offerings no longer aroused the King. Steps had to be taken, urgently and effectively, to recover that affection. With the aid of Catherine La Voisin, she concocted love philtres. She participated in magical rites, in amatory Masses, and even in child sacrifice, to gain her passionate purpose. In this sinister machination she enlisted the support of a notorious Abbé Guibourg. His scatological and lascivious activities in this respect brought about his arrest, and his summary execution. The love-potion, then, could be, potentially, a tremendously evil force, a malefic and fatal weapon, an instrument of ruin and death. But usually the potion was associated with soft and luxurious dalliance, with amorous whisperings, with marital exchanges and sophisticated deceits. So it was in Italy in particular. In the sixteenth century, many Jewesses dabbled in love potions and amatory charms. They practiced their skill in Rome itself, and acquired an established reputation as purveyors of these physiological stimuli. Ferdinand Gregorovius, who produced a monumental history of Rome, declares that Jewish women brewed love philtres in the dark of the night, for their languishing customers, the ladies of Rome. Lippold, a Jewish financier of the Elector Joachim II of Brandenburg, who also belongs in the sixteenth century, was accused, among other charges based on magic practices, of dispensing recipes for the concoction of love philtres. He was brutally tortured: then executed in Berlin. The medieval era was a period of absorption of the past, with occasional tentative gropings and some experimentation in new directions. In the erotic sphere, the Middle Ages adopted this antique heritage, at times moulded and modified it, and sometimes made use of it in new contexts. Thus there was in use an aromatic herb called popularly Sweet Flag. This was the plant known anciently as acorus calamus, that the Romans believed to be endowed with erotic stimulus. It was appropriately known to them by the alternate name of the plant of Venus. * * * * *