Love manifestations and the passion for promoting weakened or inadequate functional activity are familiar themes in the most remote areas of the world. In the Arctic circle as well as in the Marshall Islands. Among the Eskimo of uttermost Greenland and among the Jibaro Indians of Equador. The Orang Kubau of Sumatra and the Semang and Senoi of Malacca are knowledgeable in this regard. The natives of these disparate territories are familiar with the plant and animal life of their regions, the nuts and fruits, the herbs and leaves, and their properties and specific virtues. They have tested them in food and drink, and in other functional directions: and by long, groping, deductive sequences they have come to definite practical conclusions. They have managed to extract or to use certain essences and elements in these roots and plants that they found conducive to specific purposes, particularly to the primary function of life, the erotic motif, the functional performance. Oral traditions, the ways of the tribal society, derive, pre-historically, from a matriarchal hierarchy. And to the women of the tribe the obscure secrets of amorous practices and devices are all-important. Because they are the conditions of procreation, the source of fertility, the depositories of life and continuity. The love mystique, then, is the primary and virtually exclusive sacrosanct knowledge confined to the female of the tribe. Hence, after the ages of oral transmission, when we enter upon the centuries of writing, verbal transcription, and recording, then the sagas and chronicles, the legends and folk consciousness, invariably dwell on the female, the wise old woman, the witch, the adept, who possesses the arcana of erotic functions. In the course of undetermined time, as literary mastery grows and develops culturally to the degree attained by Greece in the fifth century B.C., the witch, as guardian of Aphrodite’s mysteries, is paramount. She is known to the peasant and the hoplite, to the cobbler and the young athlete, to the stroller in the agora, to the serious dramatist, even to the philosophers, to Socrates, to Plato. * * * * * In classical legend, Phaon, a ferryman of Lesbos, was given a potent periapt by Aphrodite, that made him remarkably handsome. The poetess Sappho consequently fell passionately in love with him. According to the Roman encyclopedist Pliny the Elder, author of the _Historia Naturalis_, Phaon had found a mandrake root that resembled the male genitalia. This root was an assurance of feminine love. Sappho, however, is said, in the version of Ovid’s _Heroides_, to have flung herself from the Leucadian rock on his account. * * * * *