An Egyptian papyrus in the British Museum provides the recipe for a love potion to win a woman’s love: the man has to mix some dandruff from a murdered person’s scalp with some barley grains and apple pips, then add a little of his own blood and semen, and finally the blood of a tick from a black dog. This mixture, if slipped into the woman’s drink. should have devastating consequences (58). Another winning formula, designed to make a woman enjoy love-making, was to rub the foam from a stallion’s mouth into one’s member.
A Chinese manual on camel husbandry of the twelfth century says that if your camel suffers from violent wind, the remedy includes ‘powder of centipedes, beans soaked in wine, acupuncture behind the ears, and the letting of a great quantity of blood.’
Various formulas have come down to us from the Classical world for love philters, and cures for them, involving human excrement, perspiration, menses or semen. Human ordure, in particular, was in constant use in the manufacture of these philters, being administered both internally and externally. It was sometimes put in porridge, and in other cases in shoes — for example, a man who made such use of the excrement of his lady love was completely cured of his infatuation, after wearing the defiled shoes for one hour.
Pliny claimed that the urine that has been voided by a bull immediately after covering, taken as a drink, was an aphrodisiac; another was to rub the groin well with earth moistened with this urine. An ointment of the gall of goats, incense, goat-dung and nettle-seeds was applied to the privy parts before copulation, to increase the amorousness of women. And, according to Pliny, ‘They say that if a man takes a frog, transfixes it with a reed entering its body at the sexual parts, and coming out at the mouth, and then dips the reed in the menstrual discharge of his wife, she will be sure to conceive an aversion for all paramours.’
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Philters made with menstrual and a hare’s blood drove the recipient to mania and suicide, but could also be used to make people impenetrable to an enemy’s weapon and to cure burning sores.
Many believed that the ‘magnetic power’ of human seed could be used in philters, and that by it a lover could feed the flame of his mistress’s affections; it was prepared from what was known as ‘magnetic mummy’, which, being given to a woman, threw her into an inextinguishable frenzy of love for the man or animal yielding it.
Chinese emperors were required to keep 121 wives (the number was thought to have magical properties), and make love to 10 every night. A Taoist manual advised that this could be made possible by applying sheep’s eyelid marinaded in hot tea to the imperial penis (59).
Where anti-philtres are concerned, Pliny claimed that mouse-dung, applied in the form of a liniment, acts as an antiphrodisiac; and that a lizard, drowned in urine, has the effect of an antiphrodisiac upon the man whose urine it is. The same property is to be attributed to the excrement of snails and pigeon’s dung, taken with oil and wine. He also wrote that ‘a woman will forget her former love by taking a he-goat’s urine in drink.’ Hen-dung was an antidote against philtres, especially those made of menstrual blood; dove-dung was also used for the same purpose, but was less efficacious.
According to Paullini,’a man was given in his food some of the dried ordure of a woman he formerly loved, and that created a terrible antipathy toward her.’ Hardly surprising, surely?
But to break up a love affair, nothing was superior to the simple charm of placing some of the ordure of the person seeking to break away from love’s thrall in the shoe of the one still faithful, as described above — though Pliny also claimed that ‘If a man makes water upon a dog’s urine, he will become disinclined to copulation.’ Shoes could also be used in other ways — if a man, who under the influence of a philtre was forced to love a girl against his will, would put on a pair of new shoes, and wear them out by walking in them, and then drink wine out of the right shoe, where it could mingle with the perspiration already there, he would promptly be cured of his love, and hate take its place.
Roman magicians, according to Pliny, asserted that ‘the heart of a horned owl applied to the left breast of a woman, while asleep, will make her disclose all her secret thoughts.’
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