by Jack Turner
Viewed from the present day it is difficult to appreciate that these were claims of the utmost academic respectability. That respectability, moreover, was not eroded but rather grew with time: for the medieval physician there was no argument so clinching as antiquity. But while Galen and ancient Greek medicine provided the setting and the theoretical framework of sexual medicine, in medieval times a more immediate source of spices and prescriptions alike was the Muslim Near East and Spain. It was via the medium of Arabic that the teachings of Galen and for that matter serious scientific study of medicine as a whole were reintroduced to Europe, where, by the turn of the new millennium, they found a ready market. The medieval nobleman was as worried about the well-being of his loins as any other fretful male in history; probably, given the high mortality of his offspring and low fertility rates, he had more reason to be worried.* His fears, and his possession of the cash with which to assuage them, coincided with the revival of the spice trade and, to some unknowable extent, help explain it. For both spices and advice on how to use them he looked east.
Led by Avicenna or Ibn Sina (980–1037), the most famous scientist-philosopher of Islam, the teachings of the Arab writers laid down the outlines of sexual medicine that Europe would recycle down to modern times. It is one of the great paradoxes of the history of European thought that medieval Europe looked to its religious enemy for guidance in the fields of science, astrology and philosophy. Building on Galenic foundations, Arab scientists added new recipes and spices, many of which, such as nutmeg, were apparently unknown in Galen’s day. In tenth-century Andalucia, Arib ibn Saïd al-Katib al-Qurtubi (918–980), doctor and secretary to the caliphs Abd ar-Rahman III and Alhakam II, laid out the theoretical basis of spices’ heat and its effect on sexual health: these were, essentially, the principles summarised above. The author of several works on the topic, including On the Generation of the Foetus and the Treatment of Pregnant Women and Newborns, he attributed failure to conceive and the inability to maintain an erection alike to a loss of heat. The remedy he prescribes consists of a type of marmalade, ginger, pepper, pomegranate blossom and eggs, to augment both sperm and potency.
Still more influential was his follower Ibn al-Jazzar (898–980), a Tunisian physician who was the immediate source of Constantine’s prescriptions. It was he, too, who enshrined ginger as aphrodisiac of choice, ascribing to the spice an impressive versatility in several works on the topic: to increase sex drive and fertility, to engender more abundant sperm and make the pleasure last longer. The latter in particular was a common claim of the Arab physician. Al-Tifashi, a thirteenth-century Cairene, recommended cinnamon, cloves, ginger and cardamom for ‘strength for coition … useful to anyone who manages to copulate twice running’. Other spices played the supporting role of adequate substitutes. According to Ibn al-Jazzar, when there is no ginger to hand, black or white pepper can be used, though with an attendant risk of drying out. He credits ginger’s relative galangal with producing an instantaneous erection.
Like those of all religions, Islamic authorities were capable of prudishness, but theirs was a climate vastly more suited to study and frank discussion of the topic than was to be found in the Christian West. In Ayyubid Syria, it was not beneath the dignity of Saladin’s nephew to commission a treatise on the subject from Maimonides (1135–1204), incontestably the greatest Jewish scholar of the age. As Maimonides’ preface explains, the sultan freely admitted that he was in need of a little more vim, the result of advancing age, emaciation, and the demands of his many concubines: ‘He reports, may the Lord preserve his power, that he desires to give up nothing of his habits in connection with sexual intercourse.’ Nominally, however, most Islamic works tend to promise results in terms of function and fertility as opposed to pleasure alone (though one wonders about The Old Man’s Rejuvenation in his Power of Copulation, by al-Tifashi). And whereas Christianity actively discouraged enquiry, Islam provided a greater degree of religious sanction, perhaps a consequence of the greater demands of polygamy. The spectre of demographic catastrophe remained a preoccupation of Arab thinkers from the Prophet’s own day, a time of small nomadic tribes liable to annihilation or absorption in one of the endemic wars of the Arabian peninsula, continuing through Islam’s expansion into an urban society based in the most populous cities in the world. Aphrodisiacs even enter into the hadith, or traditions attributed to sayings of the Prophet. According to the scholar al-Ghazali (1058–1111), when the Prophet complained of impotence, the angel Gabriel recommended harīsa, a mixture of porridge and meat seasoned with pepper.
Such frankness was unthinkable in the Christian West. Even as Maimonides penned advice for Saladin’s nephew, in England clerics berated Richard the Lionheart for his dalliance with Sodom (meaning, in this case, not anal intercourse, but masturbation or general debauchery). Viewed from the West, over time the spiciness of Eastern sexual medicine had a dual effect. On the one hand, the Eastern origins and the reputation of Arabic medicine provided Western scholars with the intellectual cover for an interest they could otherwise justify only with difficulty: Constantine’s works were translations. And doubtless it was largely on account of Western reticence and reliance on Eastern sources that they stuck to their Arabic models, many of which reappear centuries later, changed little if at all, acknowledged or unacknowledged, in the West. A concoction first credited to Youhanna ibn Massaouih (Jean Mesué), a celebrated Baghdad doctor of the ninth century, appears practically unchanged in the Pharmacopée Royale of Moses Charas published in France at the end of the seventeenth. This makes it one of the most enduring, if not necessarily the most effective, prescriptions of all time.
And yet this reliance on the East had a paradoxical effect. In at least some eyes the association poisoned spices, and may even have helped fuel the old myth of the lascivious Orient. It was perhaps inevitable that as Asia’s most visible exports, spices should have arrived trailing associations of the lands where they grew. So for instance in John of Hauteville’s satirical twelfth-century poem Archithrenius, or The Arch-weeper, it is both the Eastern origins and the erotic quality of spices that single them out for condemnation. As the teary hero goes on his cheerless way to the abode of Gluttony, he meets with the belly-worshippers or ventricolae, who egg on their lasciviousness with a diet of hot seasonings, their greed driving them beyond the Meridian to seek the spices of the Orient, ever searching for more novel delicacies from around the world, and condiments that nourish the libido. (What would the arch-weeper have made of a curry house?) To some, spices could simply not be separated from their sexual baggage. Two hundred years later the Carmelite Richard Lavynham, author of a Litil Treatise on the Seven Deadly Sins, linked spices to those lechers guilty of ‘abusyon’, by which he meant sex for pleasure. Characteristics of such a sinner were a diet of ‘hot meats and drinks … spices and medicines’, the sole purpose of which was to inflame the libido ‘more to perform lust than decent procreation, increasing the frailty of the flesh’.
For the English clerical poet John Myrc even the morally perfect were susceptible. In his poem Instructions for Parish Priests, written around 1450, he warns that the side effects of spiced electuaries were grievous, and would ‘enforce … to lechery’. Such was the erotic power of spices that, even if eaten with healing in mind, they might lead one into committing ‘that foul deed’. In Myrc’s eyes spices were doubly noxious, since both taste and smell provoked sins of the flesh, the latter leading even those who came forewarned into such venial sins as ‘ribawldry’, ‘harlotry’ and touching ‘woman’s flesh or thy own’:
Hast thou smelled anything to your liking,
Meat, drink or spicery,
That after you have sinned by?
And while medieval Christians at times showed complete disdain for the study of medicine – it is something of a myth that the medieval monastery was a centre of medical studies; more often, the Church actively discouraged enquiry – they did not need a Constantine or an Avicenna to tell them of spices’ p
erils, for they knew as much on impeccable ecclesiastical authority. In his work On the Customs of the Manichaeans, St Augustine accuses his erst-while co-religionists (Augustine had once been a Manichaean himself) of misunderstanding the true nature of spices’ eroticising contamination. Manichaean belief held that foods such as pepper and truffles contained within them a form of ritual pollution, whereas to orthodox Christians this was heretical nonsense. Spices’ contamination resided not in any inherent or ritual effect – matter, being God-made, was innocent – but ensued from their fuelling of the ‘sensual appetite’. Those who eat ‘peppered truffles’ – two aphrodisiacs in one – did not pollute themselves so much as goad themselves on to lust.
The practical conclusions that followed were self-evident. For the chaste, spices were out; cool and wet foods were in. To Christians concerned about the possible ramifications of such an incendiary diet, the polar opposite of foods like truffles and pepper was a native Mediterranean aromatic known as Agnus castus, Vitex agnus-castus. Classed as powerfully cold and dry, it was used by monks to incline their bodies and thoughts away from the flesh. Serapion, the hugely influential fourth-century monk and companion of the Egyptian hermit St Antony, one of the founding fathers of Christian monasticism, dubbed the plant ‘monk’s pepper’, because, as one medieval authority phrased it, ‘it makes men as chaste as lambs’. To this day the plant is known as ‘Monks’ Pepper Tree’.
Yet if the aphrodisiac reputation of spices long had the status of medical fact, it is equally true that their appeal also relied on a heavy dose of pure superstition. For a magical reputation an outré quality is often recommendation enough, and like other aphrodisiac staples such as rhino horn and tiger penis, spices long carried the freight of Eastern mystery, rarity and a high price. This held good for as long as spices retained their air of mysteriousness. Philostratus of Tyre (170–c.245), the biographer of the miracle-working Apollonius of Tyana, wrote that ‘Lovers especially are addicted to this art [of magic]; for since the disease from which they suffer renders them prone to delusions, so much so that they seek the counsel of old hags, it is small wonder, in my opinion, that they resort to these charlatans and pay attention to their quackery.’ What was true of the third century still applies in the twenty-first: ‘They will accept from the hags a magic girdle, and precious stones, some of which come from the depths of the earth, soil from the moon or Stardust; and then they are given all the spices that are grown in India.’
Other sexual magic involved greater risks. It has been a recurrent belief that the pricking action of particular ingredients can have a sympathetic effect, the best-known example being the blister-causing and myth-begetting cantharides, or Spanish fly, a favourite of the Marquis de Sade (on one occasion his stash was unwittingly consumed by some of his guests, who complained they had been poisoned). The Greco-Roman author Aelian (c.170–c.235) writes of shepherds using black pepper to stimulate mating among their flocks: ‘From the ensuing irritation the females of the herd cannot contain themselves, but go mad over the males.’ Something similar occurs in the Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter(?–AD 66), where the shipwrecked Encolpius, seeking a remedy for impotence, is sodomised with a peppered leather dildo as punishment for killing a sacred goose of Priapus (the latter being the huge-phallused god of fertility, protector of vines and gardens, reputed to sodomise any thief unlucky enough to be taken in the act. Encolpius’ fate was, however, a lesser punishment than the crucifixion stipulated by law). The Augustan poet Ovid (43 BC – AD 17) refers to an old wives’ love remedy of pepper and biting nettle, which he dismisses as worthless – prudently, it would seem – compared to his altogether more poetical methods of sweet-talking, flirtation and playing hard to get.
This unblushing acceptance of sex and aphrodisiacs vanished along with the world of pagan antiquity, but both the notion of stimulation through irritation and a sense of the potency of spices survived well into modern times. Paul Lacroix (1806–1884) cites a medieval recipe for effecting the return of a missing loved one: take a black chicken, sacrifice it ‘in the name of Jesus Christ’, then pierce its heart with five cloves, repeating all the while ‘in the name of Jesus Christ … who suffered as you [the chicken] are suffering now’, while making the sign of the cross with the spices. ‘So primed the returned will do whatever you desire …’ Often, magic merged into more medically respectable beliefs. Eggs and testicles in particular were widely believed to have a powerful sympathetic effect. In a second work on the topic attributed to Constantine the African, the Liber minor de coitu, ginger and pepper are recommended in conjunction with calves’ testicles, roosters’ testicles – all manner of testicles, in fact – and other ingredients such as grapes, melon and, another aphrodisiac staple before it became commonplace, the suggestively phallic banana.
By aphrodisiac standards even these are remarkably mild. Faith in the exotic tended to shade into faith in the out-and-out revolting, as was revealed in a curious witchcraft trial in the Danish town of Naestved in 1619. The accused, a young man, was charged with having taught a friend of his the trick of seducing a young woman with nutmeg. The idea was to eat an entire nutmeg and wait for it to re-emerge at the other end, whereupon the semi-digested nutmeg was grated into a glass of beer or wine, which was in turn administered to the unsuspecting object of the nutmeg-crapper’s affections. So primed, she was powerless to resist and liable, as the judge ruled, to do ‘whatever he might desire’. She might even pay for the privilege. In the case in question the judge found that by such foul and insidious means the accused had robbed a young woman not only of her virtue but of the cash she laid down for the unhappy experience.
And maybe, if victim and perpetrator so believed, something along those lines happened. Looking over the bulk of such remedies, however, the chief impression is not only how ineffective but how unpleasant they must have been. This is, perhaps, no great surprise, given the authorities’ credentials: the authors are almost invariably male, often clerics, and women’s enjoyment was seldom in their thoughts. But still more startling than the credulousness of a supposedly chaste monk is the survival of similar notions into more recent times. Pierre Pomet, chief druggist to Louis XIV, recommended that ‘a few Drops of the Oil [of pepper], in any proper Liniment, rub’d upon the Perinoeum three or four Times will restore a lost Erection’. This old-wifeish strain of sexual medicine endured long after the principles of Galenic medicine were in abeyance, and humoral theory discredited; indeed, in some of the wilder publications on the topic it endures to this day – run a search on the internet for ‘spice’ and ‘erection’ and see the results. The self-styled ‘aphrodisiologiste’ Marcel Rouet, author of the idiosyncratic Le Paradis sexuel des aphrodisiaques (1971), suggests that spices can be eaten, albeit only intermittently, with spectacular results: ‘A young man of twenty years whose organs, particularly the kidneys, have not had any problems, can use strong doses of spices one or two times a week without inconvenience for a prolonged erotic festival of several hours’ duration.’ (The older gent with weaker kidneys is advised to use other, less explosive, stimulants for the sake of his health.) Rouet cites the Kama Sutra as his authority that ground pepper can be applied directly to the penis before intercourse, in which event the lucky recipient of his spiced attentions will be entirely at the disposal of the owner of the peppered penis. His one concession is to rate it ‘much more practical’ to substitute oil of pepper and allspice in place of the spice in its natural state. His suggestions involving chilli pepper – ‘extremely erogenous for the woman’ – are more eye-watering still. And if the chilli fails to do the trick a piece of ginger up the rectum will do just as well.
In a field distinguished by a general willingness to suspend reason and risk extreme discomfort, perhaps the best that can be said is that at some point a reputation becomes self-sustaining, for which reason to look too hard for explanations is to take the material too seriously – at times one wonders whether authors such as Rouet were motivated more by foolhardi
ness, naïveté or a general ill-will towards humanity. The rules lack rigour – and in at least one case a spice itself was at the receiving end of sexual magic. In the Moluccas, the home of the clove, mace and nutmeg, homo sapiens has sought to return the favour, as it were, and impart a little of his own sexual vigour to the spices, in this case the clove. On the island of Ambon in the nineteenth century, the Dutch colonial administration had taken over the control of the clove plantations after several hundred years of brutal management by the Dutch East India Company. Plantation managers set Stakhanovite targets, enforcing them with ruthless efficiency. Here Baron van Hoëvell witnessed some strange goings-on in the clove groves: ‘In some parts of Amboyna, when the state of the clove plantation indicates that the crop is likely to be scanty, the men go naked to the plantations by night, and there seek to fertilise the trees precisely as they would impregnate women, while at the same time they call out for “More cloves!” This is supposed to make the trees bear fruit more abundantly.’
Perhaps the Moluccans’ horticultural eccentricities were not so far removed from the beliefs and practices of the Europeans. From their perspective, what other than some magical force of attraction could account for the extraordinary magnetism the clove exerted over the merchants who sailed from the far side of the planet, scurvy-ridden, near-dead, all for the sake of a spice?
Spice Girls
Looke, and to morrow late, tell mee,
Whether both the India’s of spice and Myne,
Be where thou lefst them, or lie here with mee.
John Donne, ‘The Sun Rising’, 1633
