Like Hargrave Jennings’ Cultus Arborum (1890), John Davenport’s Aphrodisiacs and Anti-Aphrodisiacs (1869) begins with a meditation on sundry forms of priapi found around the world. In Egypt, Syria, Persia, Asia Minor, Greece, Italy, Mexico, India, and “to a very late date, among the Christians of Europe”, writes the author, prurient sculptures prevailed, and are still present in the cultural archaeology of modern society. “There is every reason to believe that our May-pole is a relic of the ancient Phallic worship.” Well into the eighteenth century, certain regional Christian rituals and crucifix iconographies, precursors of which Davenport finds among the symbology of Egyptian pharaohs and Tibetan lamas, seemed to emblematize what Neapolitans used to call il Santo Membro, the Holy Member. Saint Foutin de Varailles was once honored across Provence, Languedoc, and the Lyonnais with “waxen models of the pudenda of both sexes”. In Orange during the Reformation, Protestants seized an enormous phallus “furnished with appendages” and burned it in the market. In Isernia, Italy, ex-votos of male genitalia — “sometimes even the length of a palm [presumably in the botanical sense — Ed.]” — were sold by devotees of St. Cosmo and St. Damianus, who set their prices with the phrase più ci metti, più meriti (the more you give, the more you get).

After twenty pages on the phallus, Davenport proceeds to discuss “Anaphrodisia; or, Absence of the Reproductive Power”, an essay that gets just about everything wrong. He breezily claims that female masturbation, immoderate orgasms, and excessive excitement are leading causes of barrenness; that promiscuous men put their “turgescence” at risk; that the clitoris “opposes the conjugal act” for “the difficulty it presents to the introduction of the fecundating organ” (he recommends amputation, then queasily details the dimensions of various women encountered by colonial officials in the West Indies). Amid the ignorance and gynophobia, there are more eccentric examples, such as the boy who “made water . . . upon the slightest friction of his linen”, the young French man accused of impotence who demonstrated his erotic ardor before a jury of peers, and the “celebrated mathematician of a very robust constitution” who was unable to start a family, for, during the amorous act, his mind continually strayed away from his wife toward algebraic visions of formulae and figures.

The most extended and eye-opening section of Davenport’s volume relates to the titular tinctures: aphrodisiacs and anti-aphrodisiacs, substances for infusing “fresh vigour into [your] organs when they are temporarily exhausted by over-indulgence” or for quelling the spring of desire when it proves a hazardous distraction. If, today, philters seem the stuff of superstition, for Davenport, they were transhistorical: “in even the remotest ages, the vegetable, animal, and mineral kingdoms have been ransacked for the purpose of discovering remedies capable of strengthening the genital apparatus”. From Leah and Rachel’s mandrakes in the Bible through the “animal principle” (that the consumption of “dark coloured flesh” promotes “the secretion of the seminal fluid”) to the use of bleeding, sedatives, and “refrigerants” in order to, well, cool “the sexual appetite”, he offers a cribbed history of libidinal supplements. The Amazons were not only prone to mastectomy, we learn, but also often sacrificed an entire limb to improve the flow of blood to their genitals, for “the lame best perform the act of love”. “Desire” and “pleasure” rarely crop up — for Davenport, an aphrodisiac is that which “will best promote the secretion of the seminal fluid”. Accordingly, “the erotic properties of truffles”, ambergris, “mollusca in general, and testaceous animals in particular”, cannabis, and “an immoderate use of chocolate” are all treated in detail. In addition to regimens of the body and pharmacological regimes, he worries about how the sex drive is affected by reading novels, texts that “throw the veil of sentimental philosophy over the orgies of debauchery and licentiousness”. Instead, he recommends mathematics (just look how well chaste Newton turned out) and Natural History, due to the discipline requiring “perambulation of the open country”.

“A poor scrivener who led a precarious existence teaching Oriental languages and writing hack literature”, according to the occult historian Joscelyn Godwin, John Davenport (1789–1877) authored several works on language, erotics, and Islam, including An Apology for Mohammed and the Koran (1869). Parts of Aphrodisiacs and Anti-Aphrodisiacs were later excerpted by Robert H. Fryar for his Esoteric Physiology series, which, in addition to Sexagma (a digest of Davenport’s writing), included Pierre d'Hancarville’s Veneres uti observantur in gemmis antiquis (1771), a collection of erotic cameos that you can read about here.