After long reflection she convinced herself that there were two possible reasons for Pausanias’ disdain.
The first was that she had grown fat and that he liked thin women. The second was that the spiritualist in question, imbued with Pythagorean ideas and turned toward the divine, feared the physical closeness of a woman, the pleasure that he might obtain from her, as a force contrary to his designs, susceptible of recalling him to the matter that he wanted to escape.
She resolved, therefore, to get thinner, and then to write for Pausanias the treatise in which practical means for orientating toward the divine the sensuality of physical amour.
It appears that at that moment of her life, her fatness was only the fear of getting fat, and that her body could claim, on the contrary, the perfection of proportions. No matter! She chewed herbs that were given to her by an old woman from Thessaly. She had herself woken up at two-hourly intervals during the night in order to run around the garden twelve times.
A slave who served as a model to sculptors, and was molded by them in plaster, told her that she had noticed a certain thinning effect in consequence of that practice, so she had herself molded too, but that was during an excessive heat-wave; the plaster dried prematurely and they had a great deal of difficulty breaking it without tearing off her skin. She had a pomade fabricated containing the hidden principles of the plaster and remained naked in the sunlight for hours in order that the effect should be more active.
She rallied to her theory a physician from Macedonia who claimed that people ate by virtue of an ancient habit acquired when human beings were savage, but that it was sufficient to drink water in order to live. She followed that regime, and died of it in a very short time.
She had not yet concluded her treatise, the fragments of which she sent to Pausanias as she wrote them. Only a small part of the treatise was recovered, which we reproduce here. What remains is sufficient to enable us to see that the Corinthian courtesan, who mingled folly and sagacity, the love of pleasure and that of philosophy, touched upon the most elevated and most anguishing problem of amour.
Is there a sublime component in the mystery that makes bodies want to join together in pairs? When we let ourselves yield without measure to our sexual desire, are we like animals? In that case, is the enjoyment in question analogous to the pleasure of eating and drinking? And if we develop that enjoyment, is it at the expense of our spirit? Are we retrogressing in the spiritual scale, of which we have climbed a few steps so painfully?
The courtesan Hermanossa resolves that problem. There is an enlightenment in sensuality. It can be a road to perfection, and a road as sure as the effort and impulsion of the soul to reach the gods.
All those who, by virtue of their culture or their religion, cannot help imagining the pleasure of the senses in amour without a taint of sin, will reflect on that conclusion and perhaps draw therefrom, for the quotidian practice of life, a liberating instruction.
And if people say that in writing her treatise, the amorous Hermanossa was less occupied with philosophical verity than the desire to possess Pausanias, if they think that she had already spent one night with him without a useful kiss or a fecund caress, and that, in consequence, she must have loved him at least as much for his mind as for his body, that nevertheless remains the most perfect form of amour.
Fragments of the Treatise on the practical means
of orientating the sensuality of physical amour
toward the divine
In the same way that Corinth has two ports, one that opens on the Gulf of Saronica, to the east, and whose waters are slightly bluer, and the port of Cenchreae, which seems to have ashes in its waves because it is orientated toward Phocis, from which mists come, so I have two souls, the one that is turned toward the light of the sun, and the one that contains ashes because it is avid for terrestrial pleasures.
…The little shadow that the sculpted wood of my bed makes on the violet mosaics frightens you as much as the darkness of Hades. You fear caresses as one fears a contrary wind on one’s route because it slows progress. You claim that the spirit alone ought to be taken into consideration and that the pleasure we draw from our body prevents it from developing and growing. Perhaps, Pausanias, you simply lack experience. When all the wine has been drunk and one no longer sees anything of it but traces on torn chlamydes, when there is no sound in the garden but that of turpentine trees brushed by the bodies of lovers, when one has on one’s shoulders and breasts the imprint of fingers that have caressed them, when one’s loins are aching from embraces and one gazes over the sea at the first light of the rising sun, then, from the lassitude of debauchery a kind of paralleled lucidity emerges, a surge of the spirit, a comprehension and an amour greater the highest wisdom that comes from study and the most profound philosophy has ever provided.
…All that you have said on this subject is not vain. Pleasure is a horse that it is necessary to tame, because it might carry you away in the Thracian forest, where the trees are so densely packed that there is no longer an issue. But if one masters it and guides it, it can carry you lightly along the luminous road that has no end.
Everyone has his truth, which he must find, and there is a method for every man. The mariner of the port who smells the sweat and is unaware of the perfume, who drinks wine and goes to the brothel to sate himself with women with sagging breasts, is not accessible to what I shall tell you. There is also a truth for him, but I do not know it. I knew it once, and I have doubtless forgotten it because truths annihilate one another as one attains them.
Not everything that you have said on this subject is vain. There are spasms that prevent you from thinking. There are spasms that bring you back in a sensible fashion toward humanity, to the point that one desires get down on all fours, to bark and gulp like a dog. There are fatigues that engender disgust. Disgust in unproductive. It is not transformable. It is necessary to vanquish it. But it is the desire that it is necessary to manage cleverly. One does not know when one first draws upon it. The first men must have been very surprised when they learned that one could obtain subtle fire from gross pieces of wood.
Plato says: “Perfection is acquired by the possession of a lover in accord with one’s soul.” Even more than happiness, we ought to seek perfection. We must find, in order to attain it, the lover in accord with our soul. There is no veritable amour but that which is simultaneously physical and spiritual, since we are both a body and a soul. Insensate is the man who wants to make one dominate in amour at the expense of the other.
You wanted me, Pausanias, to take off everything but my bracelets in order that I should be naked, as entirely naked as a rose in the sunlight, as naked as a pebble polished by the sea, and you lay down beside me. I put the palms of my hands behind the nape of your neck and designed my breasts on your breast. All that my body experienced then collaborated in stimulating the heat of my mind, but I sensed in you neither the grossness of desire nor the fury of the satisfaction whose effects you feared. A spark would perhaps have been sufficient then to ignite a purer fire than all those that have ever burned in the sanctuary of your soul.
The ideal is a vague expression that, in common human understanding, signifies perfect happiness. In a more elevated sense, the ideal signifies happiness with something more, with an adjunction of thought. The ideal has a third meaning for those who strive toward knowledge. It is direct communication with the gods. It is by means of ecstasy that one communicates with the gods, and one can arrive at that divine state by various paths. One of those paths is the physical sensuality of lovers.
“My son,” said Theophrastus of Tarentum, “there are two kinds of initiation. There is the initiation that teaches you the secret of men and the initiation that teaches you the secret of the gods. But the one that teaches you the secret of men is far more divine than the one that teaches you the secret of the gods.” The disciple of Pythagoras meant that, since we are human, it is necessary to scorn nothing that is human, but, on the contrary, t
o know it and make use of it.
Between the moment when the stars appear and that in which they go away, everyone has the possibility of arriving at the most divine state that a human can know. It is necessary for that to be next to a being that one loves, that one has the assent of the other’s thought, in default of their amour, and that one can freely enjoy the body of the other in all the modes appropriate to it. I say “in default of their amour” because reciprocal amour favors ecstasy greatly, but is not absolutely necessary. I say that it is appropriate that the enjoyment of the body be absolute because the body cannot communicate the flame if a single caress is reserved or forbidden to it. All caresses have the same purity, since they represent the gift of the body and they concur in the voluptuous state from which the divine is born.
This touches the most secret information of the doctrine of Pythagoras. One can obtain ecstasy with any being who does not resist, who gives themselves. But ecstasy is easier to obtain, and goes further into the unknowable and is more splendid. if it is obtained mutually. It is more splendid still if it is created by two beings who love one another. It attains an even higher degree if the two beings who love one another have already known one another and loved one another in previous existences. The difficulty of those beings finding one another again is certainly great, and that is the central problem of our lives. There are several means for that, which I shall indicate subsequently.
It is curious that we carry in our sexual conformation a sign that permits us to recognize, in the moment of pleasure, that the lover from whom we are obtaining enjoyment has already been in our arms, in a different form, in a past life. We also have within us a hidden sense, a personal intuition that we can develop, and which informs us of the presence around us of those beloved brethren. With them, ecstasy is obtained all the more easily because it has probably been attained already, under other skies, in other times, by another physical form.
Plato says that perfect lovers are two halves, the active principle and the passive principle, that have formed a unique whole, originally separated, and that those two halves aspire to combine again and find their true nature, which is to be one. If that theory corresponds to the truth, there would only be one being on earth with whom we could realize divine ecstasy. When I think of what I have experienced next to you, Pausanias, I am tempted to believe it.
But on reflection, I prefer the teaching of Theophrastus of Tarentum and my master Andreas, and think that with a superior will, and by realizing a few conditions, one can attain it with anyone. It is true that our life is always dominated by a single lover whom we pursue, at first without knowing them, with an irresistible fury, when we have approached them once. But I believe that that one is only a more fraternal brother, the companion most frequently rediscovered in the course of anterior existences, the one with whom we are most closely linked by the indissoluble bonds of pleasure and dolor.
Rays of sunlight are not favorable to ecstasy—to that of which I want to speak, of course, for there are others, such as those of the Syrian Barkis, the contemplator. It is necessary to wait for the end of dusk, and it is in the recumbent position that one obtains the best. There is, it appears, far beyond Persia, a community of men and women who claim that one can only procure it on a bed made of the leaves of a tree named Ban. Doubtless that tree, unknown in Greece, favors ecstasy, and is even indispensable to those Asiatics, but here, it is sufficient that, softly extended, we can give our body the most comfortable position.
When the moon is only a thin crescent, ecstasy is scarcely possible. When it is full, one finds such an aid in its light that it seems that one is on a gilded slope, and only has to let oneself slide down it.
It is necessary to be naked.
It is necessary even to have taken off one’s jewelry, for the contact of metal objects on the skin, especially the contact of gold, is contrary to ecstasy.
There are perfumes that intoxicate, but all are not equally favorable. Incense caries the spirit but reflects the body. If it is burned it is also necessary to burn musk or the essence of wild mint. And reciprocally, the aphrodisiac of the body ought to be accompanied by that of the mind. A liquid is made with the juice of the poppy, which some drink and others burn in order to breathe in the smoke. It is the only substance that stimulates the body and mind at the same time and orientates them toward ecstasy. But there is a mystery in the dose to employ, for a small quantity elevates, a greater one debases, and an even greater one enables you to communicate mysteriously with the ecstasies of other men, which are written in the air.
Men and women coming together to eat have more pleasure by the fact of their number and the joy that circulates around them. If they give themselves to love near others their sensuality is augmented. Similarly, if they have come together for ecstasy, they will obtain it more easily and it will be greater
Two women obtain ecstasy through sensuality as easily as a man and a woman. It is the same for two men, for the amour of bodies and minds has nothing to do with the law by which beings reproduce, and a caress is no less beautiful because it is infecund, and is perhaps as productive in an invisible domain.
It you want ecstasy, Pausanias, take in your arms the woman you desire, extend yourself upon her in such a fashion that your breast crushes her breasts, that your knees lean on her knees and that your mouths are mingled to the point that your teeth touch, and above all make your left hand squeeze the nape of her neck lightly where the hair begins. But at the same time as you squeeze her neck, make a subtle effort of thought and imagine with the greatest possible clarity the double image, living, active and rhythmic, of your two beings, which are fused, which are melting into one alone, until that image, instead of being double, is unique.
And when, in your thought, the image of your body and the one whose skin you are penetrating, and from which you are drawing a delicious enjoyment, is no longer any but the image of a single being, especially if you can make that vision coincide with the amorous spasm, then you will have attained the divine ecstasy of amour, you will touch the unknowable, you will have joined not only the soul of the woman stuck to you, but the Unique, that of which you are a fragment: the divine.
And all that I am telling you about these things only consists of allusions to hidden knowledge that the signs of writing will never be able to reproduce. This knowledge is related to the four elements, to the movements of the stars, to the unity. It is transmitted orally by the mouths of those who know. The items concerning amour were given to me by the philosopher Andreas, who came from Egypt and returned there. They come from the teachings of Damo, daughter of Pythagoras, who obtained them from her father, in whom the gods placed all wisdom.
Priscilla of Alexandria
When Priscilla was fifteen years old her breasts flourished, her skin acquired color and men became troubled in her presence, as if they had respired a dust of sensuality that escaped from her. Many people were astonished by that, because she was a Christian and had chastity for an ideal, and it seemed that it ought to be a logic of nature only to give the voluptuous beauty of the body to those susceptible of making use of it.
Desire prowled around her, in the onyx halls, in the paved atrium, and in the garden of sycamore and dates that descended toward the sea. Her brother Marcus—a degenerate with long ears, ridiculously deployed—strove to get into her bedroom when she was undressing there. A certain Peter, a sort of dirty Hercules, who was both a servant and secretary to Bishop Cyril,1 had once attempted to tip her over, but she had been able to escape. The only caress she had known thus far was that of a young boy who had come to play with her brother and other children like her. Slowly, he had run his hands over her body and he had kissed her lips for scarcely a second. Priscilla remembered a perfume of honey and acacia and the light charm of his fingers on her breasts. But the young boy was the son of Phrasilas, a notorious pagan, and she had not seen him again. In any case, she already knew that sin takes the perfume of a kiss and the form of a caress in ord
er to soil the soul more easily.
Priscilla was the granddaughter of the Diodorus who had perished so wretchedly twenty years before in the course of a popular riot. He had been reproached, one day when he was supervising the construction of a church, for having had several children who were playing nearby seized by his slaves and having amused himself by cutting their hair, claiming that long hair was a certain indication of paganism. When people in Alexandria learned of the death of the Christian emperor Constantine2 the idolaters rose up and massacred the most unpopular of their persecutors. Diodorus’ house had been invaded and he had been seized, not to kill him but to render him the same treatment to which he had subjected the sons of pagans. Unfortunately, the man who tried to cut his hair had no scissors. Then again, it is difficult to subject an old man who is almost bald to such an operation. He had removed all the skin from the cranium with his knife while the crowd shouted joyfully. Diodorus had died of it. He could not be counted in the ranks of martyrs because the debauched life he had led was too well-known in Alexandria.
Priscilla had often heard the story of her grandfather’s death, and the horrible image of it was engraved in her mind. But times had changed. Bishop Cyril was the master of Alexandria. He imposed all his decisions on a weak and timorous prefect. He spoke seriously about the destruction of temples. He did not hesitate to spread money in profusion among the dregs of the people, who were now Christian, in order to incite them to demonstrations against the pagan cults, and even to murders.
Priscilla’s father, Diodorus, had been nicknamed Cyril’s golden arm. He was stupid, but it was his immense fortune that paid for the Bishop’s intrigues. He represented the Christian aristocracy, made of the purity of the blood and the antiquity of convictions. So, when the time came to make the glory of God shine forth over Alexandria, Bishop Cyril asked of his friend Diodorus that his two children should be at the head of the just and pious men to whom a holy mission had devolved.
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