RECIPES FOR LOVE IN THE ANCIENT WORLD1

Vivienne Lo and Eleanor Re’em

Throughout history, a huge amount of attention has been devoted to aphrodisia.

Yet, in historical research, they tend to feature only in passing comments in stud-
ies of love, sex and the emotions, or of food and medicine. The relative absence
of monographs on the subject is, therefore, a significant lacuna.2 This chapter will
argue that it is particularly a lacuna in the history of science, medicine and empir-
icism.3 Aphrodisia, as a subject involving products and practices that have in-
duced sexual pleasure, allow us to contribute to the ‘sensory turn’ in history. Call-
ing to mind the aesthetics of an ancient world where the boundaries between
what we now think of the domains of individual senses were less distinct, aphro-
disia give us privileged access to the gathering of medical knowledge before the
observation of the eye took its post Enlightenment pride of place in the conduct of
science.4 The subject permits an ‘inquiry into the conditions under which
knowledge, or what passed for it, was produced, and the conditions under which
those who claimed to do the producing worked’. 5 It also leads inexorably to an
investigation of the history of the ‘scientific self’’ and self-experimentation. In what
terms did learned people perceive the world in ancient times? These are key is-
sues in comparative histories of knowledge production.

ACADEMIC AMNESIA

A related case of modern academic amnesia is the erasure of the erect penis
from the face of the history of civilisation. In the words of Simon Goldhill, ‘the way
we differ from the ancient worlds is also profoundly telling about the taboos and
anxieties which shadow the modern sense of the self’.6 He illustrates the enor-
mous erect phalli that populated the worlds of ancient Greece, in religious statu-

1 We are deeply indebted to friends who have helped us with this research: Donald Harper, Vivian
Nutton, John Wilkins, Penelope Barrett, Andrew Wear and Laurence Totelin. We also thank the
editors of the volume for invaluable comments.
2 Important exceptions include Faraone 1999, Faraone and Obbink 1991; Harper 1998; Umekawa

2005.
3
In this chapter we use the term ‘empiricism’ in both its usual senses. The first refers to the prac-
tice of medicine where practitioners, and communities, choose treatments in a logical fashion ac-
cording to what, in their experience, is deemed to work; and they do not need to know why ac-
cording to any guiding theoretical framework. The philosophical usage of the term opposes em-
piricism (anything based on experience) to a priori knowledge arrived at from first principles. Both
types of knowledge make claims to universal validity and, notably, a number of philosophers use
both. Descartes would provide an example of the latter, though he questioned whether the model of
the world derived from first principles was actually so in the experienced world.
4 Jütte 2005: 25 -31.
5 Lloyd 1996: 16.
6 Goldhill 2004: 29; See also Keuls 1993: 75-79.

1
ary and civic ritual, celebrating Dionysus in the world of entertainment, and as
smaller day-to-day objects, sometimes winged, candle-holders and door pulls.7

Figure 1: Red-figure pelike, attributed to the Hasselmann Painter, BM1865,1118.49.

The erotic power of phalli was not limited to mundane sexual engagement. A little
known and unique red-figure pelike depicts a woman watering erect phalli as if
they were plants. There is later European testimony to this harvesting of disem-
bodied penises by women, a subject crying out for gender analysis: perhaps a
joke about male anxiety over the cuckold (it’s likely to have been produced by a
man), loss of virility, or the sexual power of the woman in the kitchen (she might
cook them), a connection with mystic ceremonies of Athenian women, such as
the Thesmophoria? Some phalli had an apotropaic function to protect the state,
community and household, marking the boundaries of the Athenian world. Where
erect phalli were part of Greek ‘furniture of ancient religion and social life’, in Chi-
na they seem to have been a common feature of funerary furniture. Huge bronze

7 Goldhill 2004: 30-33.

2
examples, one double shafted, have been found decorating the tombs of wealthy

nobles.8

Figure 2: Double phalli from Tomb M1 Mancheng, Hebei.

In this context they evoke the potency of images of sexual prowess in sustaining
the power of the body, even beyond death. During the 20th century these phalli
were one of the most consistently ignored features of ancient Chinese archaeol-
ogy.9 The quantity of aphrodisiac texts from the ancient Chinese world has also
gone relatively unacknowledged and the survival of their knowledge in modern
Chinese pharmacology texts goes virtually unacknowledged.

8 Goldhill 2004: 34.

9 Erickson 2010: 80; Li Ling 2006: plate 8.1-3.

3
Figure 3: A chart of the Vulva. Mawangdui tomb 3 (closed 168 BCE)

Twentieth-century censorship of the ancient world’s preoccupation with aphrodis-

iac drugs is also apparent in Sir Arthur Hort's 1961 translation of Theophrastus of
Eresos’ (c. 370–288/85 BCE) fourth century BCE Historia Plantarum (Enquiry
into Plants, hereafter HP), the work that Scarborough claims ‘formed the basis for
all succeeding studies of plant lore classifications until Linnaeus’.10 Sir Arthur
omitted the section 9.18.3ff about the Orchid (ὄρχις [testicle]) ‘on account of the
description of the physical effects’, testifying to the existential crisis of many his-
torians of the time. The omission elicited the objection: ‘Such prudishness in a
scientific book is truly shocking.’11 Fifty years later we can do better. Surely, the
nature of these ‘physical effects’ is of prime importance to a history of self-
experimentation and empiricism. Like the erect phallus, aphrodisia have also
been pervasive not only in the social and religious performance of wealth and
power.

DEFINITIONS AND SOURCES

10 Scarborough 1978; 2010.

11 As quoted in Gemmill 1973: 127-9; Sarton 1959, vol. 1: 555. For a translation of the missing sec-
tion see Preus 1988: 88-91. .

4
The major challenge of comparative history is surely to find commensurate con-
texts across cultures and time that facilitate matching case with case. Aphrodisia,
as we understand the Greek term, represent all those techniques to entrap and
enhance sensual love, sex and beauty traditionally associated with Aphrodite:
cosmetics, binding spells, drugs to enhance performance and attraction. This
range of topics is also conveniently germane to related evidence from ancient
Chinese literature.

Greek and Roman sources for aphrodisia in this broad sense include the writings
of the philosophers and naturalists such as Theophrastus, the medical treatises
of the Hippocratic writers (fifth to fourth centuries BCE), and Pliny (23-79 CE), as
well as Greek and Roman poets and playwrights such as Ovid (43 BCE - 17/18
CE), Archestratus (fourth century BCE) and the Attic comedians as cited by Ath-
enaeus (c. second–third centuries BCE). Information on ancient Greek products
that create sexual pleasure and promote competence is quite common in ancient
medical literature. Materia medica will mention when a product is aphrodisiac
among other indications of its efficacy in treating illnesses and promoting health.
Spellbinding texts permit access to the circumstances of everyday love. For love
magic, the Greek magical papyri, the works of Julius Africanus and the Greek
magical papyri (to fifth century CE), including the demotic Egyptian handbooks
provide direct testimony to practices that we know survived from the ancient into
the medieval world.12

For China, our major focus for aphrodisia is also recipe and spellbinding literature
from the Western Han tomb at Changsha Mawangdui 馬王堆 (c.168 BCE), of the
old Han kingdom of Chu 楚. 13 Later testimony to the survival of the relevant reci-
pe literature is taken from among the Dunhuang manuscripts (sealed in Cave 17,
c. 1035. As in early Greek medical writing, the authors of these recipe texts were
anonymous individuals and in the Greek case their work was compiled into large
textual corpora. Their findings speak of the collective memory of countless indi-
viduals who contributed to establishing and disseminating ancient scientific
knowledge across a millennium.

To understand the broader theme of the emotions we also have to scan earlier
philosophic literature of the Warring States (475-221 BCE), here texts attributed
to Mencius 孟子(fourth century BCE), and Xunzi 旬子 (c. 313–238 BCE). Our
analysis is therefore of the Greco-Roman worlds and China before the first centu-
ry of the first millennium, with reference to later literature that testifies to the con-
tinuity of some traditions. In both Greco-Roman and Chinese worlds this was the
period in which one can see major systematisation of medical theory. We could
equally be talking of Indian aphrodisia, except that the Sanskrit texts that we

12 Viellefond 1970; Faraone and Obbink 1991.

13 The Mawangdui burial mound was excavated in the early 1970s. It contains three tombs. Tombs
no. 1 and no. 2 belonged to the Marquis of Dai (軑侯), Li Cang 利蒼 (died 186 BCE), and his wife
(tomb no. 1). Tomb no. 3, from which the manuscripts were excavated, was occupied by their son,
who died in 168 B.C. at the age of about 30. For the excavation report see Hunansheng bowuguan
and Zhongguo kexueyuan kaogu yanjiusuo 1973: 39–48.

5
might consider, like Kāma Sūtra, are composite texts generally dated to around
the third century CE and extant from much later. Moreover, in the case of recipes
that tie together longevity and sexual prowess – in the process of vajikarana –
those texts (e.g. Caraka samhitā and Suśruta samhitā) are notoriously difficult to
date and mainly promote milk products for their impact on ojas (vital essence)
drawing on the association of milk with semen (sukra). The Greco-Roman con-
texts provide a much richer and more coherent comparison.

LOVE, SEX AND APPETITES

‘Love’ is the most difficult of the categories to compare. Different types of passion
and affection moved the ancient Greeks: eros, storge, philia, and agape. Storge,
understood as the love of a parent for a child and familial bonds of emotion,
seems hardly relevant to aphrodisia; agape, as the kind of human heartedness
that overrides selfishness, seems devoid of the kinds of feelings or lust attendant
on sensual love. Physico-emotional passions crystallise in the term eros, with po-
tentially unwanted lust, and torture, or in philia. The word philos was used to de-
scribe the family and its close, intimate associates or to describe a philosophical
group.14 Philia was a complex emotion: inspired by people with whom one has
certain reciprocal commitments, where we also find the encompassing familial
feelings of delight and warmth. It was an emotion that might elicit a kiss and em-
brace or equally hetero or homosexual intercourse with affection. 15

Modern scholars searching for love in ancient China have also failed to find tidy
categories. Attention has centred on the words ai 愛 and qing 情 (note the mod-
ern word for mood or state of emotions, qingxu 情緒), and we add here also qin
親, which broadly means ‘to treat someone as if they were kin’. In the Warring
States, qing meant something like ‘one’s natural endowment’ and from Han
times, it was assimilated to an ‘array of notions’ concerned with passion and
emotion.16 Ai, the modern word for ‘love’ between lovers and family members, as
well as for expressing preferences such as an appetite for particular foods, is no
less ambiguous. Closely associated in philosophy with ‘universal love’ or ‘love for
each and every one’ as promoted in the school of Mozi (c. 5th-3rd centuries BCE),
ai was a transcendent feeling of benevolence as well as sexual love.

THE SENSORY TURN

14 Humphreys 1983: 67. Humphreys notes that ‘the term philios overrides the distinctions we make
between love, family and friendship’. The conventional translation of philos as ‘friend’ might suit the
philosophical context but not the familial.
15 Faraone 1999: 29-30; For discussions of homosexual, familial and marital love see Humphreys

1983: 17-18, 42-43, 54-57, 66-78.

16 Andreini 2006; See also Allan 1997: 85.

6
Since the early 1990s there has been increasing research into how the sensory
base of emotion operates in different scientific cultures. Rather than cultivating
emotional detachment, as was the prescription for objective and unfettered ob-
servation among mid nineteenth century scientists, early Chinese scholars
trained themselves as knowledge gatherers through training their bodily qi, a
term which came to codify and communicate inner body sensations. This cultiva-
tion of learned recorders of the world, their epistemic virtue, meant that the self,
the perceiver, embodied what was perceived.17 Constellations of meaning gath-
ered around the notion of qi in the literate communities of ancient China and con-
tributed to a remarkable ability to articulate changes in the inner landscape of the
body in their relation to the wider environment. This community attention to the
inner world is what might be called an early Chinese ‘sixth sense’, the cultivation
of which enabled the management of digestion, body temperature, emotion, pas-
sion and pain, the impact of drugs and breathing. These intimate experiences of
the inner body were placed on a synesthetic continuum with experiences of the
external world: seasonal affect, the influence of the heavenly bodies, ancestral
and other spirits. Initially acting as a social marker that distinguished the self-
cultivation of the nobility, a repertoire of qi techniques also began to shape the
rituals and language of medical practice at the beginning of empire.18

Experiments with pleasure found in the earliest extant texts that theorise sexual
cultivation were the ground upon which a new medical language of Yin, Yang and
qi was first constructed – a kind of knowing that informed classical treatises on
acupuncture and drugs and that, being mediated through the body, never aspired
to levels of pure abstraction.19 These new techno-physiologies of the body were
premised on the authority of pre-existing writings that were more philosophic in
tone and sought to restrain the consumption and display of material wealth. Writ-
ings attributed to Xunzi (early third century BCE) recognised delayed gratification
and the ‘sustaining’ or ‘connoisseur’ pleasures as the mark of the socially stabilis-
ing figure of the ‘gentleman’.20 In Xunzi, we find reference to a body-centred prac-
tice in which calming the heart and clearing it of anxiety was a key to a deeper
and more prolonged appreciation of pleasure – a pleasure that eschewed the
loud, brash and gaudy in favour of the refined appreciation of senses honed to
simplicity.21

The sage ruler was a ‘perspicacious’ individual who comprehended the deep
structures of the universe through a heightened acuity of the senses. Sensory
perception ‘was valued as a genuine part of moral reasoning in ancient China’.22
Thus gluttony and the uncivilised pursuit of sexual satiation were contemptible,
but the pursuit of culinary finesse and the mastery of sexual techné belonged to
the highest domain of gentlemanly pursuits. The rationale behind male sexual
continence, an anxiety shared across the ancient worlds, was that the more

17 Daston and Gallison 2007: 39-41.

18 Lo 2001: 19–51.
19 Lo in Bray et al 2007: 383–424.
20 Nylan 2003: passim.
21 Nylan 2003: 73–124.
22 Sterckx 2003: 72.

7
pleasure a woman had, the more benefit there was for the man. Her pleasure
was a correlate of the extension of qi through her body.23

Practical substance in the form of instruction to the man was given to this techné
of the senses in the literature and culture of self-cultivation.24 He must learn to
recognise, respond to and codify all the stages of female arousal: her aromas,
sounds, breathing and movements, the feeling of being inside her. The qi (in a
sensory experience cognate today with orgasm) emanated from the zhongji 中極
Middle Extremity. By the first century CE this term referred to an acupuncture
point, but in the second century BCE it had simply been a lyrical anatomical term
for the area in the general vicinity of the uterus. At the moment of the woman’s
orgasm the male partner absorbed the Yin essences of the woman, through the
physiological interaction of the essences that occurred with the extension of qi in
the female body, and the concomitant expression of the emotion of love: If only
he can be slow and prolonged, the woman then is greatly pleased. She qin ‘treats
him with the closeness she feels for’ her brothers, and ai ‘loves’ him like her fa-
ther and mother.25

At the height of her rapture the woman is apparently overcome with feelings for
her sexual partner akin to those she feels for her siblings and parents. As if this
isn’t uncomfortable enough for a modern reader, the man, reserving his orgasm,
is simultaneously deriving an increment to his health and strength from the Yin
essences emitted by the woman at the point of orgasm -- which resulted in a
state of shenming 申明, a brilliance of the spirits for him (and possibly for her).

Recording the essential characteristics of female sexual response were a key to

this process. They inhabit a larger discourse with a specialist terminology which
interlinked restraining pleasure with the generation of the cosmos, so that ‘who-
ever is capable of this way is designated ‘heaven’s gentleman’.26 We can already
detect that the quality of writing in this technical literature does not reveal the kind
of separation between philosophical and technical writing evident in Aristotle’s
(384-322) hierarchies of knowledge. To Aristotle the techné of the physician was
inferior to the larger rhetorical skills concerned with philosophy, and it was limited
by its utilitarian ambitions.27 That is not to say that Aristotle eschewed knowledge
acquired via the senses. Far from it. The four primary qualities that he espoused
were known mainly through touch: hot, cold, dry and wet. But while it was per-
fectly possible for a philosophically sophisticated doctor to investigate causes
and so be ‘scientific’ according to Artistotle’s criteria, the study of medicine alone
was insufficient. Only the freedom of leisure and plenitude would create the con-
ditions for pursuing natural philosophy, and the correct synthesis of rational
thought and empirical knowledge to understand the body. Rather, the learned

23 Pfister 2012: 34–64. MWD 4156.

24 Lo 2001: in Bray et al 2007.
25 Harper 1998: 438. MWD 4 (He Yinyang) nos. 66-67
26
Ibid.
27 Wear 2013: 63 n.7, n.8.

8
physician must enhance the status of his knowledge and practice through an in-
quiry into first principles, fundamental propositions about the nature of the world,
a view echoed later by Galen in his treatise The Best Physician is also a Philoso-
pher.28

Famous polarities of opinion, however, provide evidence of the diversity of atti-

tudes towards the knowledge and practice of medicine and healing in the Greco-
Roman world, and the figure of the practitioner: famously the Hellenistic medical
sect, the Empirics valued experience alone, finding an early empiric in Hippocra-
tes.29 An Hippocratic author of the fifth century treatise Ancient Medicine thought
that ‘medicine should have its own knowledge independent of philosophy’.30 For
the Empirics, whose work echoed this Hippocratic sensibility, much of the search
for first principles and the causes of illness was pointless activity. Valuable
knowledge came, for example, from the serendipity of drug discovery, together
with the recording and re-recording of drug effects, and trial and error.31 Already
in the sustained attention to this process we can see a trained observer mediat-
ing simple collective empiricism with specific ways of framing the medical object,
methods which we will see brought to the nature of sexual stimulation in the next
section.

SEXUAL CONTINENCE

Early Chinese and Greeks alike left records about the sexual body. For the au-
thors of the Mawangdui aphrodisiac literature knowledge about the body required
a particular kind of preparation, and one in which expertise in the sexual arts pro-
vided enhanced insights. The anonymity of the authorial process suggests a col-
lective knowledge, with acquisition of a shared language, resulting from personal
experimentation. By suppressing ejaculation, a man strengthened his qi and jing
精 and gained an increment of youth and vitality. This appears to be a rather dis-
passionate and medical approach to sex, which pursued enhanced health, al-
tered states of spiritual sensibility, power and longevity for the male partner – lat-
er texts even claimed that intercourse with multiple female partners would lead to
immortality. The following excerpt is the outcome of a technique that includes
both breath and sexual cultivation:

..in drinking wine and eat the five flavours; put the qi in order with intent and
the eye will be bright, the ear keen, the skin will gleam, the one hundred
mai will be full and the Yin will rise again. From this you will be able to
stand for a long time, go a long way, and live for (ever).32

28 Wear 2013: 63 n.4. (K 1.53-63).

29 Lloyd 1987: 158-162.
30 Quoted in Wear 2013: 63, n. 9.
31 Nutton 2004: 149-151.
32
MWD 4 (Shiwen) nos. 40-41. Ma 1992: 914. See also Harper’s note on the re-ordering of the
bamboo strips by Qiu Xigui. Harper 1998: 396-7 n. 8.

9
The focus here was not on procreation but on the more esoteric benefits of absti-
nence from indulgence, strengthening Yin, the word ‘Yin’ being construed as the
penis itself, but also the Yin qualities of the body – its coolness, its moistness, the
health of the internal organs and thus the ability to endure both in terms of sexual
continence and long life. For men the concern for increasing potency was found-
ed on a fear that, through the loss of the most precious essence and the source
of life, ejaculation would deplete their power.

The man who wished to distinguish himself as a learned gentleman had to be-
come a micro-technician of the senses. By the second century BCE practices
that trained the appetites involving food, sex and breath cultivation techniques
formed the key context within which new physiological ideas emerged. Healing
and sustaining a powerful body was thus codified with a new science of the
senses. As these anonymous writers began to document an aesthetic experience
of how it felt inside to be well and strong, of experiences of desire and pleasure,
of digestive satisfaction, of sexual excitement, they created a language of Yin,
Yang and qi with sufficient semantic traction that it was able to convey the chang-
ing states of the inner sensory world.33

Good health was not consistent with male ejaculation, neither in ancient China
nor Greece. Aristotle described the mystical qualities of semen that were related
to a divine aether.34 The Hippocratic treatise Generation notes that a man’s seed
is drawn from all parts of the body, and particularly its moisture,
making it the most powerful part of his make up so that ‘when we have inter-
course we become weak’ with the loss of ‘the most potent and richest’ essence of
all the bodily fluids.35 Sexual stimulation produced a warming of the body fol-
lowed by agitation. The combined effect was thought to produce fluidity and
foaming (aphrein), which travelled to the brain and down the spinal marrow to the
loins. Sperm was then foaming blood that arose from disturbance (taraxis) pro-
duced by innate heat.36 Since it exited the body in a sudden spasm the man’s
pleasure was brief and his health compromised.

The subjugation of women’s health and pleasure to her power of generation is

confirmed throughout Greco-Roman medical writing. Generation sets out a rather
mundane physiology of sexual processes that stresses reproductive health and
the health of progeny. On the Nature of Women also recommended having chil-
dren for general health. Regular sex moistened and plumped up the womb and
was a cure for many diseases. Illness came to unmarried women.37

Female desire and pleasure were a pre-condition for conception: ‘When women
have finished having their periods, they conceive (hold in the belly) especially

33 Lo 2000; 2001: 19-51. The faculty of sight was least competent at perceiving any form of internal
qi. External qi was visible as clouds, steam, or the dust and threat of, say, a distant army. Most
books on the senses ignore the undifferentiated sea of sensation within the body. See Geurts 2005
for a study of the ‘panopoly of inner states’ described as seselelame in West Africa. For the percep-
tion of touch see Kuriyama 2002 and Hsu 2010.
34 Lonie 1981: 100.
35 Alter 2013: 138. For Hippocrates Generation 1 see Potter 2012: 1-24.
36 Lonie 1981: 101.
37 Potter 2012: 194-197.

10
when they feel desire’, a point which rather contrasts accepted notions of the
separation of lust and family affection in the concept of agape. A woman disen-
gaged or forced into sex might not conceive for the seed would flow out of her
uterus. ‘Love (agape: desire and affection conjoined), on the other hand, made
the seed fit together and …. intercourse with passion (eros) produces children
much faster.’38 Compared to the sudden male spasm, women’s pleasure was
protracted. Ideally, to maximise eugenic potential both partners would achieve
simultaneous orgasm. A healthy constitution and strong sperm/sperma in both
parents together with a co-ordinated climax would produce a strong child. In a
resolutely androcentric approach to female sexuality, however, we learn that the
woman stopped enjoying sex once she had captured the sperm. Pleasure was
but a necessary side-show, not an end in itself.

In summary, ancient physiologies of sex and reproduction were clearly gendered

in the ancient worlds, and delivered alongside prescriptions for avoiding loss of
sperm/sperma or the finest qi in the Chinese context. In the case of the Hippo-
cratic writings the medical view was trained on the circumstances that would en-
hance fruitful reproduction rather than the pursuit of pleasure. In the Chinese
sources reproduction was only tangential to social, aesthetic and health consid-
erations. In both cases, Greco-Roman and Chinese, the primary sources allow us
to consider the epistemic virtues implicated in the cumulative, long-term practices
of noting and recording sexual activity.

LOVE CHARMS AND BINDING SPELLS

The combative nature of sexual engagement, its violent spasms (tarachē), the
weakening of the body, can be seen in other less noble and gentlemanly do-
mains of Greco-Roman life, and in a very different kind of text that belongs to the
realm of cursing. Greek magical papyri describe techniques to entrap the objects
(sometimes multiple women), of a man or woman’s desire. Sometimes the spell
aimed to work literally through tormenting a woman’s body supernaturally with
erotic spells so she would feel, ‘the (?) longing as a she-cat (5) feels for a male
cat, … ‘ ‘a yearning, a love, a madness great….she seeking for him (going) to
every place’ , the fury (10) ‘of Yaho, Sabaho, Horyo…: for I cast fury on you’ : un-
til such time that she succumbed, and thereby released herself’.39
The Greek magical papyri tend to date from the latter part of our time period until
the fifth century CE, but their form, siting and purpose connect them to the defix-
iones, the curse tablets, for which there are examples from as early as the late
fifth and fourth centuries BCE. 40 As Faraone points out, the spells aim at control-
ling the ardent male while arousing the passive female.41 References to passion-
ate women’s spells are also to be found in the Idylls of the bucolic poet Theocri-

38 Aetius (16.26) translated in Parker 2012: 116.

39 Tr. Griffith and Thompson 1921: 185.
40 ‘Nestor’s Cup Inscription’ is one such inscription. If a man drunk from it he would be seized by a

passion for sex. See Faraone 1996: 19.

41 For Pliny as a later Roman source, see McClure 2002: 236-7. On the gender politics of Greek

love charms, see Winkler 1992: 90-91, 95-98.

11
tus. Here in extracts from Idylls 2, the discomfort of sickness and the torment of
erotic seizure seem to elide:
I bind you, Theodotis daughter of Eus, by the tail of the snake and by
the mouth of the crocodile and by the horns of the ram and by the
venom of the asp and by the whiskers of the cat and by the penis of
the god, that you may not be able to have intercourse ever with an-
other man either frontally or anally, nor to fellate nor to take pleasure
with another man except me alone Ammonion Hermitaris.42

Some of the speakers are clearly female, aiming to draw and compel the man:

[1] Where are the bay-leaves, Thestylis, and the charms?

Fetch all; with fiery wool the caldron crown;
Let glamour win me back my false lord's heart!
Twelve days the wretch hath not come nigh to me,
Nor made enquiry if I die or live,
Nor clamoured (oh unkindness!) at my door.
Sure his swift fancy wanders otherwhere,
The slave of Aphroditè and of Love.
I'll off to Timagetus' wrestling-school
At dawn, that I may see him and denounce
His doings; but I'll charm him now with charms 43

Or resolve love-madness:

[22] First we ignite the grain. Nay, pile it on:

Where are thy wits flown, timorous Thestylis?
Shall I be flouted, I, by such as thou?
Pile, and still say, 'This pile is of his bones.'

The last in this sequence introduces the linking of animals and aphrodisia:

[52] The coltsfoot grows in Arcady, the weed

That drives the mountain-colts and swift mares wild.
Like them may Delphis rave: so, maniac-wise,
Race from his burnished brethren home to me.

There is also evidence that spells were generic forms into which the cursors
would insert their, and their would-be-lovers’ names, invoking the interventions of
common Goddesses and animal spirits, spells of fire and the symbolic power of

42 Winkler 1992: 94; Jordan 1985.

43 Theocritus Idylls II tr. Calverley 1892.

12
herbs. Binding spells in the ancient Greco-Roman and Chinese worlds shared
many features: categories of ingredients such as those belonging to the so-called
Dreckapotheke, that is the use of human and animal parts such as faeces, nails
and hair; incantations, and magical writing. The spells are recorded and in-
scribed, however, in quite different ritual contexts, in remedy collections, poetry,
inscriptions, historical records as well as in the curse tablets.

Allegations of spellbinding and the burying of wooden manikins by palace women

to secure the interest of the Han emperors provide well-known stories from the
standard histories about early Chinese love magic.44 The Mawangdui medico-
divinatory literature provides further evidence of the use of binding spells, outside
and far from the palace.45 This more direct evidence implies that a third person
was responsible for the spells, perhaps a member of the family, but more likely
someone charged especially with, and charging for, this kind of ritual service.
Here is an excerpt from the Mawangdui text given the modern title of ‘Za jinfang’
雜禁方. 46 The art of seduction and binding of lovers seems to be integrated into a
category of spells concerned with creating and/or disrupting social harmony:
separating, as well as bringing together couples; harmonising mother/daughter-
in-law relations; stopping dogs barking.

[1] Where there is a dog that likes to bark in the courtyard and gate,
daub mud on the well, in a rectangular band five chi long. When the hus-
band…
[2] …and wife dislike one another daub mud on the doorway X in a
rectangular band five chi long. When you wish to seduce a noble person,
daub mud
[3] …on the left and right sides of a gate in a rectangular band five chi
long. When you have frequent foul dreams, daub mud beneath the bed
[4] …in a rectangular band seven chi long. When the husband’s
mother and his wife like to fight, daub mud on the doorway in a rectangular
band five chi long. When an infant
[5] …likes to cry, daub mud on the window in a rectangular band five
chi long.
[6] When involved in a suit with another person, write the person’s name
and set it inside a shoe.
[7] Incinerate and smith the tails of two female doves. Drink it yourself, and
seduction will occur.
[8] Take quantou that faces east-west. Incinerate and smith. Give it to the
husband and wife to drink, and they will be driven apart.
[9] Take four nails from the left claw of a male dove and four nails from the
left hand of a young girl. Scorch in a saucepan, combine and smith. Apply it
to the person and the person will be obtained.

44 Loewe 1974: 42, 81.

45 See Li Jianmin 1996: 8.
46 See Liu Lexian 2005, tr. Lo.

13
 [11] Put the person’s left eyebrow in liquor and drink it. You invariably ob-
tain the person.

This miscellany of spells to bring people together and drive them apart, to resolve
household disharmony, and to create it, was buried in a box at Mawangdui tomb
3 together with other literature dedicated to the healing arts and stored separately
from works on philosophy, statecraft, and astronomy etc. The selection indicates
an early form of meta-categorisation concerned with the techné of the body and
its emotions, in this case directed by the funerary director. The categories also
mirror, very closely, the fangji 方技(recipes and techniques) bibliographical cat-
egory of the Han imperial library (recipe literature, theoretical treatises, the arts
of the bedchamber and immortality).47 This eclectic approach has to be under-
stood as a feature of the systematisation of medicine in Han times, integral to the
larger processes of synthesis common to imperial administration.

Spellbinding literature of Chinese origin in a 10th century Japanese medical com-

pilation and the divinatory and medico-technical writings of the Dunhuang manu-
scripts suggest the geographic and temporal range of this tradition.48 Here the
first four spells of Rang nüzi furen shu mifa 攘女子婦人述秘法 (Detailing the se-
cret art of stealing women), are actually concerned with binding one’s own hus-
band:

[103] Whenever you wish to make [your] husband love [you] get the earth
from under a red dog's feet and place it below his navel. He will immediate-
ly love the wife.
[104] Whenever you wish to attract your husband’s love and respect, get
his thumb nail and burn it to ashes, mix with wine and take it. Tested.

Chinese and Greek spellbinding involved strategies to resolve the discomforts

and desires of passion. It assumed the intervention of spirits, the power of incan-
tation, the resonances between things that are alike, be that the nails of the lover
pursued and the claws of a bird, a manikin resembling the object of desire, or the
power of rectangular mud symbols when daubed on the walls.

The question of how to evaluate perceptions of the efficacy of spellbinding de-

serves a sustained analysis which is certainly beyond the scope of this chapter.
While there have been many important contributions to this question, notably
from medical anthropologists, it is not enough to attribute the impact of ritual
techniques to a psychological ‘placebo’ or an anthropological ‘meaning re-

47Hanshu 6.1776-80.
48
Ishinpō, juan 26. Cf Qiu Xigui 1992; Li Ling 2001; Li Jianmin 1996. See P.2661, P.2666 and
P.2610.

14
sponse’, solely effective within particular cultural parameters.49 Modern attempts
to explain cause and effect within a discourse of social meanings fail to explore
how shared and repeating ritual behaviours gather and preserve knowledge, the
efficacy of which is understood differently as time goes by. This is easiest to un-
derstand when the ritual involves the sustained ingestion of particular substanc-
es. The transition from burning of artemisia annua to determine an environment
safe from malevolent disease-causing spirits, to its use in drawing and strength-
ening qi and the treatment of intermittent fever, to its ingestion as modern public
health drug of choice in the prevention of malaria is a case in point. The sus-
tained attention to the effect of the plant involves observation and recording with-
in changing, but still linked, ritual, epistemological, and institutional domains.

Love charms and binding incantations were often used together with substances
considered potent in the arts of love and seduction. The latter may have included
tonics put into food or drink or ointments to induce sexual passion in another per-
son.50 In the next section we turn to the aphrodisiac drugs and recipes them-
selves which reflect a practice of self-medication, the key techné upon which the
coming argument about empiricism and the senses rests

THE RECIPES

… apart from powers for health and disease and death, they say that herbs
have other powers not only on bodily things but also on those of the soul. I
mean by 'bodily' those concerned with generation and infertility. In fact
some (plants) do both from the same part, for example the so-called orchis
[testicle]; for as there are two <roots>, a large and small, the large root, if
given in milk of a mountain goat, makes one more functional for inter-
course; the small one harms and prevents. This plant has a leaf like the
squill but smoother and smaller; the stem is very like that of the euphorbia
used in unburnt offerings (Theophrastus 9.18.3).51

Where historical aphrodisiac recipes were placed, categorised and how they cir-
culated reveals a great deal about their role in the ancient world. Just as culinary
and medical recipes, they were not merely a guide to practice, they also repre-
sent a record of the collective imagination of that practice. In all there are some
1500 recipes in the Hippocratic Corpus, and most of the aphrodisiac recipes lie in
the gynaecological treatises.52 Totelin emphasises large areas of overlap in an-
tiquity between cosmetological, gynaecological and sex manuals and all the reci-
pes had procreation as one of their main purposes. This reproductive aim did not,
however, preclude sexual pleasure, or the use of ancient cosmetic texts as a kind

49 See Moerman 2003 and Geertz 1973.

50 Dickie 2001: 16-17. The word philtron and its calque in latin – amatorium may have roughly the
same range of meanings although the terms are restricted to the procedures of erotic magic.
51 Tr. Preus 1988: 88.
52 Totelin (private communication).

15
of pornography. Breath fresheners, face creams and remedies against freckles,
dandruff, toothpaste, alopecia and spots, remedies to whiten scars, hair dyes,
depilation creams all point to a lively market for beauty recipes, products and
self-improvement in the pursuit of love, sex and marriage. These were Galen’s
‘vices of embellishment’, the concern of all women but not the legitimate cosmetic
work of medicine (Galen disingenuously includes his own versions to save wom-
en from danger).53

What of the remedies designed to enhance sexual performance? Totelin again:

‘the Hippocratic compilers of recipes made use of a vast array of ingredients that
were sexually connoted, but the gynaecological treatises do not explain efficacy
beyond ascribing it to the treatment by opposites i.e. curing dry vagina with moist
figs'.54 Speaking of the Scythians the Hippocratic treatises Airs, Waters Places
states that ‘people of such a constitution cannot be prolific. The men lack sexual
desire because of the moistness of their constitution and the softness and cold-
ness of their bellies, a condition which least inclines men to intercourse’.55 The
remedies to charge up the Scythian constitution, it stands to reason, must be
heating food and drugs.

Aphrodisiac efficacy was partly established through what has come to be known,
since Paracelsus, as the ‘doctrine of signatures’, the similarity of plant morpholo-
gy with parts of the body. Plant bulbs, especially the orchid, enhanced male sex-
ual performance for their being reminiscent of testicles; other plants commonly
cited are eruca sativa (rocket, arugula), arugula with honey and spices which
might enhance an erection and when laced with saturia (aphrodisiac bulbs) would
increase both size and pleasure.56 Theophrastus described a penis cream that
could cause ‘twelve erections in succession’.57

A combination of the exotic, the wild and the rare, with the power of the doctrine
of signatures in an ingredient was apparently very exciting: Cyranides, writing on
the wild pig (suagros) states that ‘its testicles, dried and crushed as a drink, incite
to the sexual act’. Eggs from the partridge ‘incite to the sexual act’.58 Tail of the
lizard or the deer, molar of the skink, brain of the crane, womb of the hare, the
salpe fish, animals and birds like goats and sparrows noted for their sexual pro-

53 Totelin (forthcoming).
54 Totelin 2009: 207.
55
Tr. Chadwick and Mann 1978: 165.
56 Faraone 1999: 10, n. 93, and 20 . The general meaning of saturia and the intriguing penis cream

alert us to the problem of matching plant and mineral names to modern terminology. We have tack-
led this problem as best we can. General categories for species such as orchid, or the terms for
common substances such as ‘egg’ are undoubtedly correct, but terms we translate as ‘mallow’ or
‘realgar’ can only be read with the usual caution. We follow traditional and dictionary conventions
that are open to challenge on account of the variations of plant terminology from one place to an-
other and the inevitable distortions of modern categories.
57
Theophrastus HP 9.18.9 (also cited by Pliny NH 26.99)
58 Cyranides 2.35, 2.47, 3.38.

16
clivity were all ascribed sexual potency.59 They could be consumed, worn as a
bracelet, carried on the hand or rubbed on the body.60 Metrodora the author,
some claim, of the oldest medical text written by a woman, writes:

Recipes that are pleasurable: take the womb of a hare fried in a bronze fry-
ing pan, add 3 litrai of rose oil, then mix with sweet perfume, fat (4 drach-
mai), excrement of crocodile (3 dr.), sap of the plant scorpion, blood-red
sumach (2 dr.), honey (4 dr.). Some add also a little fat of sparrow.61

There is a small step from observing that two things that have the same physical
structure are likely to exert a mutual influence to noticing that activities shared by
humans and animals might both be enhanced by the same substance. There are
many tales in the ancient world where the substances used to encourage stud
animals to mate gain a reputation for stimulating human sexuality. Theophrastus
comments ‘in Achea, and especially around Kerynia there is a kind of vine whose
wine makes pregnant women abort; if bitches eat the grapes they also abort’.62
Pliny describes how wines laced with the elusive saturion and hippomanes were
used to stimulate sexual desire in horses.63 Yinyang huo 淫羊藿 (Horny Goat
Weed; Epimedium) gets its Chinese name from a story about a Chinese goatherd
who discovered its magic after repeatedly observing its effect on his flock.64
Epimedium contains icariin a muscle relaxant that exerts a mild biochemical ac-
tion on the penis similar to Sildenafil, the active ingredient of Viagra.

For the most part the Greek aphrodisiac recipes were simples. Pliny offers many
special plants that could increase a man’s potency such as terebinth and donax.
He also cautions the anti-aphrodisiac effects of herbs such as numphea which
relaxed the phallus, or lettuce, agnus castus, rue, or condrille which limited desire
in different ways 65 Valuing the work of those with on-the-ground experience,
Theophrastus claimed that his information came from the pharmakopolai and the
root-cutters. Assertions like a drug ‘from a man from India’ could make a man
have tireless sexual energy also suggest hearsay. Multi-substance remedies, as
are found in the early Chinese recipe tradition, come sometime after with Nican-
der (fl. second century BCE), Dioscorides (fl. first century BCE), and Galen. Ga-
len’s Simple Remedies, for example, states that, ‘concerning turnip gongulis, the
seed of turnip leads to sexual desire’.66 But many of the simples were infused in
wine which was the vehicle for their action -- a sure way to achieve part of the
desired aphrodisiac effect.

59 Faraone 1999: 20, n. 90.

60 Faraone 1999: 19.
61 Metrodora 36 ed. Del Guerra 1994: 52-53 tr. courtesy of Laurence Totelin.
62 Theophrastus HP 9.18.3-11. tr. Preus 1988.
63 For saturion see 26.99; hippomanes see Pliny NH 8.165, 26.181; Faraone 1999: 21.
64 From Mingyi bielu 名醫別錄 (Separate Records of Eminent Physicians) as cited in Bencao

gangmu juan 12.

65 Faraone 1999: 19; Lloyd 1983; For terebinth see Pliny NH 24.28; donax 24.87; numphea 25.75;

lettuce 19.127; agnus castus 16.26, 110; rue 34.89; condrille 22.91.
66 K 11.861.

17
We can see many aphrodisiac substances in ancient China, and especially those
that are sexually connoted like asparagus for the shape of its head and the way
in which it grows so erect in the ground. They were clearly used for their erotic
rather than reproductive value. This was also the domain of longevity practices
where new medical ideas were forming. Here is Da Cheng’s 大成 (Great Perfec-
tion) response to the Yellow Emperor on being asked how to refine ones’ com-
plexion and delay aging. Da Cheng was an established authority in esoteric
teaching.

When coitus with Yin is expected to be frequent, follow it with flying crea-
tures. The spring dickey bird’s round egg arouses that crowing cock. The
crowing cock has an essence. If you are truly able to ingest this, the jade
whip is reborn. Best is engaging the member. Block that jade hole. When
brimming then have intercourse, and bid farewell with round eggs. If the
member is not engaged conserve it with roasted-wheat meal. If truly able to
ingest this, you can raise the dead.67

Here, in what is a set of questions exploring longevity and immortality and its as-
sociation with sexual competence into old age, the language is replete with eu-
phemisms for the penis (the crowing cock, Yin, jade whip, the member) and the
vagina (jade hole). Potency and fertility are represented by the round egg and
avian creatures, and simultaneously strengthened by eating eggs and sustained
with roasted-wheat meal. When stripped of the literary allusions the methods
seem quite ordinary. But here we also find new codes emerging that were ulti-
mately to shape nutritional and medical theory.

The aphrodisiac recipes from the Mawangdui tomb contain all the methods asso-
ciated with Aphrodite in the Greek tradition. There are recipes for sustained and
larger erections, copious semen, and general strength of qi for virility, ‘contrac-
tion’ and ‘increasing fineness’ of the vagina, hair removal after childbirth and for
curing genital swellings: asparagus with chicken breast and a whole black rooster
to boil the offal of a young black dog, to be taken in the afternoon in whatever
quantity required, beef, yam, cinnamon, wild ginger and wormwood combined
with oyster and Qin Zanthoxylum (a variety of Sichuan pepper) increase strength.
Snails charge up the ‘horse’ (penis). Pork fed on pine truffles stimulate the wom-
an; cow horn, ginger and cinnamon soaked in vinegar and administered via a
vaginal suppository increase her ‘craving’.68

With food and sex the stuff of everyday life it is easy to imagine how basic empir-
ical observations about the effects or substances on the body could first be no-
ticed by the authors and compilers of those recipes, and second, feed in to
scholarly reflections on the nature of the body and its physiology. Evidence of this
process is easily discernible in the body of the aphrodisiac recipes and, in this

67
MWD 4 (Shiwen) nos. 10-14. Harper 1998: 389.
68 Ibid.

18
respect, contrasts with the style of those prescriptions excavated from the same
tomb that are aimed at the treatment of other peoples’ diseases. Where the reci-
pes for stimulating one’s own sexual appetite, pleasure, and strengthening and
conditioning the genitals are replete with techniques to rid the body of foul qi, to
fortify, renew and strengthen Yin and qi, the collections designed for treating ill-
ness [rather than increasing a sense of strength and well-being] have barely any
recourse to these terms of the emerging science. Neither can they be read
against an esoteric literature framed in its terms. It is therefore to those texts that
are concerned with self-experimentation and cultivation that we must turn to trace
the history of the interface between the remedies and techniques of the ancient
world and the new world that we now associate with the authority of classical
medicine.

Measuring and controlling the internal sensory environment of the body is par-
ticularly evident in those aphrodisiac recipes that aim to ‘Cause Burning’, ‘In-
crease Craving’ and ‘Cultivate Strength’. The fruits of the pagoda tree make the
body ‘seem[s] to itch but does not itch’, a vivid evocation of sexual ardour; vari-
ous degrees of heat, from subtle to intense, are identified on different surfaces of
the skin as the effect, for example, of inserting honey, ginger and cinnamon
soaked suppositories and massaging with napkins; wild ginger, curled cinnamon,
ginger and monkshood increase qi and make a person’s face lustrous. Woven
cloths soaked in red ants and blister beetles, a universally attested irritant used
as an aphrodisiac and known to us as Spanish fly, rubbed on ‘the jade whip’ star-
tle the horse into action.69 Dried horsemeat and monkshood soaked in alcohol
make the ‘six extremities strong and increase longevity’ while other alcoholic
preparations made from fermented millet and herbs ‘when ingested for one hun-
dred days, [it] make[s] the eyes bright and ears perceptive; the extremities all be-
come strong…’ Interspersed with the aphrodisiac recipes are more general cate-
gories which contain prescriptions for strengthening the body which align sexual
prowess with an overall concern for potency and the general sense that this con-
dition of well-being was consistent with a prospect of prolonging life.70

Spellbinding and recipe literature detailing ingredients and practical techniques

for entrancing lovers and increasing their sexual desire and performance con-
trasted with the poetry of the more theoretical literature of the sexual arts with its
appeal to new styles of understanding the human body in its relation to the natu-
ral, social and cosmological environment. Apart from the more frequent refer-
ences to Yin, Yang and qi the aphrodisiac remedies are structured like the reci-
pes for curing illness, with content lists and category markers, for easy access
and retrieval. The aphrodisiac collection, however, ends with a ‘discourse’ that
marks it clearly as a text that stands between the ancient worlds of empirical and
ritual healing and the formation of classical medical and nutritional theory. In a
brief concluding section that serves to contextualise the remedies the legendary
Yu 禹 is in conversation with his consorts about the perils of excessive sex and

69 Harper 2005: 91-100.

70
Lo, V (forthcoming, 2016-7).

19
the subsequent loss of qi. His stated desire is to ‘bring together qi so that man
and woman propagate’. ‘Young Beauty’ warns against violent engagement and
suggests a broth of woolly grass and mugwort to restore him. Thus this endnote
suggests that the aphrodisiac literature cannot be read in isolation from the more
theoretical treatises on the nature and purpose of sexual union and the tech-
niques themselves. This one reference to ‘propagate’ is the exception that pro-
duces the rule. There is no remedy in this collection that deals directly with re-
production, fertility, or virility in relation to producing children. Most directly ad-
dress sexual competence, pleasure, generalised strength and long life.71

Does the aphrodisiac record of ancient China mark a transition between passive
observation and deliberate research, where the latter involves an active desire to
extend knowledge?[1] We have demonstrated a community of researchers en-
gaged in the collection and organisation of data collected through a range of sen-
sory experiences. In what is surely the earliest surviving map of the female geni-
tals appended to one of the aphrodisiac collections we see observation of an ide-
alised anatomy, a line drawing marking pubic hair, locating vaginal aromas
choushu 臭鼠 (the smelly rat), and the chizhu 赤珠 (red pearl’, a euphemism for
the clitoris), designed like a control panel in the pursuit of knowledge and power.
This is a remarkable diagram, demanding further analysis, but which for our pur-
poses testifies to the range of senses through which information about sexual
response was hypothesised and recorded in early China.72

While there is both intentionality and theory involved in the matching of animal to
human contexts, and traditional knowledge always presupposes an on-going ac-
cumulative process of trial and error, in this combined recipe and theoretical liter-
ature, devoted to the sexual arts, we find a specialist literacy and images which
demonstrate new and sustained styles of recording observations and sensory
perceptions of the body – valuable records of the collective experimentation of a
new group of learned self-experimenters. While we cannot locate this project in
any particular institution, it is clear that it is part and parcel of a widespread medi-
cal culture that was operating through the new networks of knowledge that
spanned the Yellow River plains and Yangzi valley in the early centuries of em-
pire.

CONCLUSION

While disparaging the over-elaborated correlations of turn-of-the-millennium ‘pro-

to-science’ as ‘a low point in the debasement of Chinese thought’, Angus Gra-

71 Regular comments that a recipe has been ‘tested’ or is ‘excellent’ suggest there was a hierarchy
of good cures established by precedent. Where remedies rely on belief in the direct involvement of
the spirit world, the anthropologist’s distinction between ‘efficacy’ and ‘felicity’, or the ‘meaning re-
sponse’ as identified by Moerman, help gauge the excellence of their contemporary appropriate-
ness, but this hardly explains the full range of connotations. High praise may also simply be a mar-
keting ploy.
72
Ma Jixing 1991: 748.

20
ham made an important point. In China, correlative thinking, exemplified in Yin-
Yang and Five Agent cosmology, extended easily in to what, in other contexts,
might be thought of as sympathetic magic or sumpatheia as often discussed by
Greeks and Romans.73 Thus Yin-Yang divisions of the body, astronomy, astrolo-
gy and the planetary gods and spirits existed on a continuum, and were em-
braced within the same natural order.74 The kind of observations about reso-
nance and mutual influence between things of the same form and nature is as
much at the core of ritual magic and binding spells as it is in translating animal
behaviour to the human world. We have provided examples of these records for
the ancient worlds of Greece and China.

Some of the recipes recorded are based on millennia of collective belief and em-
piricism, anonymous records of the accumulating experience of healers, farmers
and root gatherers. Others are the result of a learned community of individuals
who contributed their work, still anonymously, to a burgeoning body of technical
literature. The Chinese aphrodisia, we have argued, stand at the threshold where
what one might imagine as the simple empiricism of the former met the learned
approaches with which scholars recorded their experience of the body and its
care.

The language and structure of key aphrodisiac remedy collections have provided
the clearest evidence of the empirical process merging with the new medical the-
ories of Yin, Yang, Qi and Jing, for the reason that they reflect the experiences of
the body in self-experimentation. This was an intimate process that involved a
community of learned practitioners whose aesthetic engagement with their scien-
tific objects (the self, and sexual partners) required comprehensive sensory per-
ception and not just the singular and limiting observations of the eye. This pro-
cess is not evident in the parallel Mawangdui medical recipe texts for treating pa-
tients, that is other people, with named illnesses, and therefore indicates that the
sexual arts were a key context for medical innovation. To our knowledge, thus
far, there is also no reason to believe that in the ancient Greek world aphrodisi-
acs and the sexual arts formed a special context for the development of medical
theory. And this marks a major point of difference.

In this chapter we have surveyed a much-overlooked subject in the History of

Medicine. We have done so comparatively demonstrating, categories, definitions,
concepts and techniques of the sexual arts that were shared in the ancient
worlds. Key differences we have discovered include the overarching reproductive
aims of Greco-Roman aphrodisiac recipes, and the unique Chinese use of self-
experimentation in the sexual arts as a cornerstone of a new medicine. We hope
that this small beginning will inspire others to consider serious study of aphrodisia
as a contribution to the history of the ‘scientific self’.

73 Graham 1989: 349-50.

74 Graham 1989: 382.

21
 ABBREVIATIONS
HP Historia Plantarum
K Kühn
MWD Mawangdui
NH Natural History
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