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
The Smara Pradipa, consisting of some four hundred verses, expounds
amatory laws or tendencies. It was the work of the poet Gunakara.
The Ratimanjari is a brief poetic exposition on love, whose author was
the poet Jayadeva.
The Panchasakya is considerably longer, and is divided into five Arrows.
The author was Jyotirisha.
Woman, in these treatises and poetic elaborations and expositions, is
the central theme, and her physical traits, ideally considered, and the
elements that, cumulatively, constitute her dominant attraction, are
minutely and imaginatively depicted: the texture of the skin, the shape
of the moon face, the coloring of the hair, the brightness of eye are
measured and defined in relation to cosmic phenomena, to flowers, to the
lotus, to the mustard blossom, to the lily and the fawn, and, above all,
her devoutness is stressed, and her impassioned worship of the Hindu
pantheon, the totality of the deities.
The Kama Sutra is an extended exposition of love and its procedures and
manipulations, in some 1200 verses divided into sections in which
various aspects and techniques in amatory mores are treated.
And, like The Perfumed Garden and similar Oriental excursions into
sexual activities, it diffuses an aura of religiosity, a solemn sense of
reverence, a divine acknowledgment. The tone is frank without prurience:
the elaborate classifications and injunctions are minute and lucid
without introducing an undercurrent, however unobtrusive, of deliberate
and gross scurrilities. It is not libidinous, then, in intent, for the
author himself, a profoundly contemplative religious devotee, adumbrated
his work, not as a salacious and lewd inducement to debauchery, but as
an exposition of the physiological man who, while making concessions in
conformity with certain established amatory principles, may yet
transcend his carnal desires and, instead of being enslaved by his
erotic lusts, may become master of them and use them under due control,
but never without restraint and a kind of Hellenic and Aristotelian
moderation, a physiological aurea mediocritas.
The floruit of the author of the Kama Sutra has not been determined
definitively. It has been variously assigned between the first and the
sixth century A.D.
The entire work is pervaded by the three Hindu concepts of Dharma,
goodness or virtue, in the Greek sense, Artha, which is wealth, and
Kama, sensual pleasure.
The range of topics covers normal and abnormal conditions and practices:
wedded love and fellatio, public harlotry and transvestism, courtship
and the frenzies of passion, the behavior of wives during a husband’s
absence, the artifices of feminine conquest, osculation and amatory
permutations, the employment of an intermediary, the ways of the
courtesan, and, finally, personal adornment, tonic medicines, methods of
exciting desire.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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