Of love and lettuces
As we hand over Easter eggs and chocolate bunnies, it’s timely to consider the worship of fertility throughout the ages
Spring is associated with fertility by many cultures, with celebrations involving everything from maypoles to salad vegetables, says Ian Morton
Since ancient days, nothing was more sacred than fertility. Continuity of the human race sustained by good husbandry and a bountiful natural world were the absolutes. Every culture worshipped divine and mystical forces, unseen but given names and form, which were believed to promote and govern survival. The Old World abounded with gods and goddesses. Northern and eastern Mediterranean areas worshipped a good two dozen deities understood to affect fertility. Greece and Rome shared some 30. Egypt had 13. Nordic and northern Europe listed 17, and the Celtic areas at least nine. Ancient peoples believed in multiple chances. In total, cultures worldwide venerated some 170 recorded fertility deities.
Men may have felt the need to boost their libido but it was the function of women to enhance the chances of pregnancy, and empathy between the female sex and the earth was widely perceived. Notions of Mother Nature, mother country and motherland confirmed the solid maternal processes of fertility, birth, nurturing and overall survival. In the ancient hagiarchies of procreation, especially human, goddesses outnumbered gods by two to one. The instinct to revere the female no doubt accounts for the way we refer to productive domestic animals as cows, sheep, hens, ducks and geese, not bulls, rams, cocks, drakes or ganders.
Most familiar from the classical world whose culture, language and art so framed ours – more so than that of our own pagan forefathers – must be Venus, goddess of love in Roman mythology. Yet she represented not only love and beauty but also fertility and all sexual collusion, including prostitution. She welcomed many godly lovers, among them Bacchus, by whom she conceived Priapus, the minor deity depicted with an enormous erection. Such an appendage was to be admired. He had a counterpart in ancient Egypt, the similarly endowed Min, god of reproduction and lettuce – not as bizarre as it may seem, for Egypt’s two Lactuca varieties were upright and released a white sap when handled. The plant was sacrificed to Min and devoured by men desirous of enhancing their potency.
Aphrodite, the Greek version of Venus, was likewise patroness of fertility and girls and, in due course, gave her tacit approval to the many potions claimed to induce love and lust over succeeding centuries. Rabbits were sacred to her, and in both Greece and Rome the gift of a rabbit would
encourage a barren wife to conceive. Pliny the Elder recommended a meal of hare as a cure for sterility and declared that it would sustain the diner’s sexual attractiveness for the next nine days. He further guaranteed conception within three days if the lady ate a hyena’s eyeball with liquorice and dill, while two hairs pulled from the tail of a she-ass should be knotted together during intimacy.
In the Celtic world, too, hares and rabbits were symbols of femininity, fertility, longevity and wealth. Their horned god Cernunnos personified fertility throughout the natural world, for flourishing livestock and fecund fields were equally essential to survival (Fecunditas was another of the relevant Roman goddesses). A number of animals symbolised fertility in Celtic and Welsh culture, including horses, cattle, pigs and wild boars, and Eostre, their goddess of the moon, spring and fertility, was attended by a white hare. It laid coloured eggs, representations of which were given to Anglo-saxon children during the spring festivities – hence the Easter bunny and the painted eggs that passed into Christian tradition.
Tree worship was central to fertility rites. Anglo-saxons believed that a woman could become pregnant by resting under a particular tree or by bathing in a nearby sacred spring. In English villages the 1 May pagan spring celebration, Beltane, opened with the erection of the maypole, usually a young birch tree, to be bedecked with long ribbons that the young folk seized as they danced round it, symbolically intertwining the strands. Females, animals and fruit trees were touched by hazel rods cut for their supposed power to stimulate fertility, and after the day’s festivities young couples, unmarried or otherwise, were expected to adjourn to the woods where the Green Man, otherwise known as Robin Greenwood or Robin Goodfellow, held sway. A male child born nine months later was referred to without stigma as Robin’s son. It has been suggested that this established the 15th most common surname in Britain. Tree worship was banned by Charlemagne in 782 and by the Church in 1227, but the seminal call of woodlands could never be denied, and never is.
English folklore records any number of nostrums, amulets and activities designed to achieve a pregnancy, though separating the legitimate desire to produce a family from the quest for sexual conquest or pure indulgence was contentious. The whole business suffered the whiff of witchcraft, sometimes benign but more often sinister. The honest pursuit of conception suggested, for example, that earthworms be incorporated in a concoction as a symbol of the fertility of the soil, while a host of supposedly active ingredients representing regeneration would include powdered human bone, pubic hair, menstrual blood, the bone marrow and spleen of a murdered boy, and a piece of consecrated communion bread retained under the
The aroma of almonds was deemed to generate productive arousal in women
tongue. But malevolent intent might involve sparrow heads, pigeon blood and heart, deer heart, stork droppings, the testicles of an ass, or bones from the left side of a toad that had been eaten by ants. At least our forebears did not share the traditional Chinese belief that a fox’s testicles sprinkled with sugar and roasted encouraged fruitful lovemaking.
Herb potions were widely employed, with mandrake, verbena and henbane among the most favoured. Honey, used as a palliative and was virtuous in its own right. Basil and cardamom were thought to stimulate male sex drive and boost potency, strawberries were described as ‘love nipples’ and the aroma of almonds was deemed to generate productive arousal in women. Fertility recipes could be complex. One recorded in 1628 prescribed: ‘syrups of motherwort and mugwort, spirit of Clary, root of English Snakeweed, Purslain, Dates, Pistaches, Conserve of Virvine, Pineapple-kernels picked and pilled… stamp all these into an electuary, then put in gally pots and keep it for use’.
But practical action could be taken, too. For Dorset women, a night asleep on the turf of the Cerne Abbas Giant’s 36ft chalkoutlined phallus was said to promote conception, though tradition did not specify whether she should lie alone. Hagstones – rocks with natural holes as a result of water action – were believed to have mystical properties, and those with apertures large enough for a woman to pass through had a fertility role since they symbolised the birth channel. The Cornish claimed that the Crick Stone, a neolithic rock with a large central hole found at Madron near Penzance, would endow a woman with conception if she passed through it seven times (it was also supposed to cure a child with rickets if it was passed through naked nine times). Hagstone power was and is revered worldwide.
While the real world pursued fertility by fair means and foul, pseudo-science entered the fray in London in the 1780s. Having travelled widely and picked up some knowledge of electricity in the US from Ebenezer Kinnersley, Benjamin Franklin’s associate, failed Scottish doctor James Graham opened a ‘Temple of Health’ in the prestigious Adelphi development near The Strand with the patronage of Lady Spencer, mother of the notoriously naughty Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. He delivered lectures on marriage guidance and conception, peddled medicines, including Electrical Aether and Nervous Aetherial Balsam, and his establishment offered electromagnetic, musical and pneumatic therapy with the assistance of scantily-clad ‘Goddesses of Health’. The story goes that one such, styled Hebe Vestina, the Greek goddess of youth, was a lovely servant girl called Emma Lyon, who then became mistress to Charles Grenville, second son of the Earl of Warwick. He in turn passed her on as payment of his debts to his uncle, Sir William Hamilton, and as Lady Hamilton she become Nelson’s paramour.
Graham, who employed two hulking bouncers, known as Gog and Magog, declared sex to be patriotic and procreation a national duty, and opened new ‘Temple of Hymen’ premises in Pall Mall featuring a 12ft by 9ft domed and canopied ‘Grand State Celestial Bed’ incorporating a tilting frame to put ladies in the best position to conceive. An illuminated legend urged, ‘Be fruitful, multiply and replenish the earth’. A procreative mood was encouraged by fresh flowers, turtle doves and a musical automaton that played more loudly when the couple’s movements intensified. Their activities also triggered increasing electromagnetic vibration of the edifice. Ostensibly this exciting facility was offered to married couples. The talk of the capital, it attracted aristocratic and society clients among whom the creation of an heir was paramount, and the 50 guineas a night fee (£8,800 in today’s cash value) was undoubtedly thought to be money well spent. Whether children resulted is not recorded. Graham’s least provocative fertility advice was a daily wash in cold water for the male genitals. He was mocked and lambasted as a quack by the medical establishment, and financial problems sank the project after three years. Graham went on to advocate the benefits of ‘earth bathing’, lecturing in Panton Street premises buried up to his neck in soil. Meanwhile, the pursuit of fertility by his former clients continued in traditional and proven circumstances.