When applying herself to the goose, from its breast she drew a lusty liver, and then told me my future fortune. But that no mark of the murder might be left, she fixt the rent goose to a spit, which, as she said, she had fatten’d a little before, as sensible it was to die.
In the mean time the wine went briskly round, and now the old women gladly devour the goose, they so lately lamented; when they had pickt its bones, Enothea, half drunk, turn’d to me; “and now,” said she, “I’ll finish the charm that recovers your strength”: When drawing out a leathern ensign of Priapus, she dipt it in a medley of oyl, small pepper, and the bruis’d seed of nettles, paulatim coepit inserere ano meo. Hoc crudelissima anus spurgit subinde umore femina mea. Nasturcii sucum cum abrotano miscet perfusisque inguinibus meis viridis urticae fascem comprehendit, omniaque infra umbilicum coepit lenta manu caedere. Upon which jumping from her, to avoid the sting, I made off. The old woman in a great rage pursu’d me, and tho’ drunk with wine, and their more hot desires, took the right way; and follow’d me through two or three villages, crying stop thief; but with my hands all bloody, in the hasty flight, I got off.
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.