Love Potions Through the Ages: A Study of Amatory Devices and MoresWedeck, Harry E.
History
Love Potions Through the Ages: A Study of Amatory Devices and Mores
Wedeck, Harry E.
Aphrodisiacs -- History; Erotic literature
India is a spacious land of astounding contrasts and variations. It is a
land of mystery and mysticism, and at the same time it investigates
reality with infinite patience. It is a land of diversified, age-old
cultures, and its ancient university at Taxila in the Punjab ante-dated
the Hellenic Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum by long centuries. Yet it
has had and still has illiterate villages, where legends and sagas of
antique doings are still transmitted orally. It is a continent of
abundant wealth, and its maharajas and princelings and emperors have
been resplendent in golden raiment, exultant in their treasure houses
where lakhs of rupees lie heaped alongside rubies and emeralds, diamonds
and pearls, and a dozen other varieties of precious stones, almost
beyond human reckoning and evaluation. Yet, within this very century,
children have stood at lonely wayside stations, from Bombay to
Rawalpindi, in the Punjab and in Bengal, in the North West Frontier and
in Madras Presidency, clamoring for roti and pani, bread and water. It
is a land of lavish fertility, and a land of recurrent famine and
devastation. A land of hieratic formalities and a land of innovation.
India is a country of artistic achievements of the highest order, of
profound philosophical speculation, of monumental poetic and literary
production. It is dedicated to things of the spirit, yet its Kali craves
blood. It clings adhesively to remote traditions, to ethnic and
religious mores, to indurated social ways. Yet it forges ahead, eager to
maintain itself in the forefront of industrial expansion. It maintains
old domestic and communal demarcations and rigidities, yet it welcomes
the novelties, the mutations of this restless age. It is dedicated to
intellectual, cosmological meditation, yet it probes into sexual
manners, into the characteristics of lust and passion, and all the
secretive unspoken intimacies of carnality. It has practically made a
monopoly of texts and treatises on the subject of love and all its
darker and more intricate and subtle manifestations. It is a country
that has produced, in this field, six of the major manuals, poetic
eulogies or expositions, dealing with the forms and practices of
Aphrodite Pandemos.
The Ratirahasya, variously called the Koka Shastra, was the work of the
poet Kukkoka. It consists of some eight hundred verses on love
techniques.
The Ananga-Ranga, also called Kamaledhiplava, was written by the poet
Kullianmull, and belongs in the fifteenth or sixteenth century A.D. The
contents describe factually and realistically the physical
characteristics of various types of women, their deportment, dress,
facial and bodily traits, their amatory responsiveness, together with
certain principles that establish objective amatory criteria.
The Rasmanjari was the work of the poet Bhanudatta. It classifies men
and women according to personal behavior, age, physical type.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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