by Jack Turner
As far as spices were concerned, then, proverbial desirability meant proverbial peril. Cinnamon in particular was singled out by no less an authority than Augustine (354–430), bemoaning his misspent youth when he ‘walked the streets of Babylon, in whose filth I was rolled, as if in cinnamon and precious ointments’. There was more to this note of corruption than a Church father’s notoriously acute nose for sin. In repudiating cinnamon Augustine was merely repeating the biblical truth. For all spices’ appearance in mystic guise in the Song of Songs, they also recalled Ezekiel’s ruined city of Tyre, with her cassia, calamus and ‘best of all kinds of spices’, wrecked by the east wind from the heart of the sea. And after Tyre, there was Babylon. The same apocalyptic literature that placed spices in paradise also located them among the ‘the fruits’, as Revelation addresses the fallen city, ‘that thy soul lusted over’:
Alas! Alas! Thou great city,
Thou mighty city Babylon!
In one hour has thy judgement come.
And the merchants of the earth weep and mourn for her, since no one buys their cargo anymore, cargo of gold, silver, jewels and pearls, fine linen, purple, silk and scarlet, all kinds of scented wood, all articles of ivory, all articles of costly wood, bronze, iron and marble, cinnamon, spice, incense, myrrh, frankincense, wine, oil, fine flour and wheat, cattle and sheep, horses and chariots, and slaves.
As the Song was to the poet, so this passage was to the predicant: as spices were the food of love, so were they tinder for the jeremiad. In an age saturated in scripture and not short of apocalyptic instincts of its own, it was hard, if not impossible, to look on them as innocent.
Not all, of course, took such an extreme view. It is true, on the one hand, that a dogged minority made heroic efforts to allegorise the shattered city’s cinnamon and spices as symbols of vanished virtues, so reconciling the evangelist’s searing vision with other biblical passages where spices appeared in more mystical guise. But others, the majority, were more inclined to see spices as symptomatic of the foul excess of Babylon-Rome, symbolic of the ‘stinking life of the heretics’, or the luxurious excess for which it was made desolate, as the apocalypse phrased it. This, the prevailing view, was at least as old as the hugely influential early Christian martyr St Hippolytus (c.170–c.236), presbyter and antipope, author of the treatise Concerning Antichrist. At best Babylon’s luxuries epitomised the false glitter and promise of earthly goods; at worst they were yet more symptoms of its fornication and ‘excessive luxuries’, the ‘maddening wine of her adulteries’, on which the great merchants of the earth waxed rich and for which they were annihilated. ‘How much she hath glorified herself, and lived deliciously, so much torment and sorrow give her.’
When the apostle John wrote these words from the Aegean island of Patmos (as tradition would have it), by Babylon he meant not Babylon of Mesopotamia, then a mere satrapy within the Parthian empire, but the real mistress of the world: Rome. And it is no coincidence that the apocalyptist’s catalogue of Babylonian riches reads like a summary of the Roman luxury trade – indeed they offer, in a backhanded way, the clearest indication of how esteemed a luxury cinnamon and spices were. The apocalypse corresponds closely to the official lists of the Eastern luxury articles subject to duty as they entered the Red Sea by order of the (Christian) Emperor Justinian (483–565): cinnamon, ivory, linen, pearls and gold. The same qualities of sensual luxuriousness that recommended spices also condemned them, crying out for the apocalyptist’s lash. God would remember Babylon’s iniquities.
As, apparently, did everyone else. As the Eastern trade emerged from the long torpor of the European Dark Ages, to the commentators if not necessarily the consumers the scouring of the apocalypse soured spices’ proverbial sweetness. If anything, the growth of the trade did not so much detract from as inflate their conspicuous perils. The sulphur kept intruding. Early in the twelfth century, precisely at the moment when cinnamon returned to Europe in volumes not witnessed since Roman times, Hugh of Saint-Victor looked to spices as proof that Rome’s decadent luxuriousness was repeating itself. Stretching east beyond the new Babylons he saw arising from the twelfth-century ‘renaissance’, Hugh imagined vast trains of camels, merchants burdened with their wares, bearing all manner of spices, rare and precious garments, huge masses of metals, every precious stone, horses and slaves without number – which was, in fact, not a bad description of the caravans that brought the spices west across Arabia. The world was on the move once more, but to Hugh the most conspicuous of the Eastern luxuries represented no triumph of enterprise but the resurfacing of the human avidity for lucre. Cinnamon was the seasoning of calamity.
The moral was not necessarily limited to the apocalyptist’s theme of imperial decline. Spices could equally well do didactic duty for what we would now call issues of personal consumption. Indeed with their libidinous encumbrance there was scarcely a luxury better suited for the purposes of the doctrine, much beloved of the medieval moralist, that anything even remotely enjoyable is bad for you. The idea was a sort of inverse epicureanism: the sense, in the formulation of Pope Leo the Great, that ‘That which delights the outer does most harm to the inner man.’ Spices surface in this exemplary capacity in the text known as The Alphabet of Tales, a collection of edifying stories that circulated in various versions from the thirteenth century on, under the heading of ‘how misery and disasters frequently follow bodily delights’. A fifteenth-century English version includes a story of a duke’s wife so addicted to luxury that she would not wash herself with any water but the dew gathered by her maidens on a summer morning (one wonders what she did in winter). It being beneath her dignity to eat meat with her hands, she insisted on cutlery – the detail reveals much about medieval table manners – and ‘she would make her bed so redolent of spice that it was a marvel to tell of. And as she lived in this manner, by the righteousness of God, she was so smitten with cancer and sickness that she rotted so … that no creature might bear the smell of her.’
It was, in other words, a suitably stinky comeuppance for her too-fragrant hedonism.* On the other hand, spices were not all bad. So foul was the stench of the festering noblewoman that all her servants left but for a single handmaid, who ‘might not come near her for the stink, but for the many sweet-savouring spices at her neck; and even so she could not tarry with her any length of time for the horrible stink’.
In the scheme of these zero-sum morals, of equal and opposite reaction between now and the hereafter, spices made for something of a moralist’s bromide. Precisely on account of their proverbial sweetness, their prominence among the luxuries of the medieval nobility, they formed a telling and, or so it was hoped, salutary contrast with a life of Christian austerity – or, which amounted to much the same thing, the bitterness of death and hellfire. For sweetness now surely meant everlasting stench later. After the cinnamon came brimstone. Thus Peter Damian, that mystical author so reliant on spices in evoking his mystical transports, but so disgusted with them in the real world, imagined the damned in hell: ‘They shall shriek through their teeth, who here delight in their gluttony; will bewail without end those things in which they delight in here voluptuously; who here inhale the aromas of spices, and long for their tang, shall there be wracked by a sulphurous stench, and a pitchy cloud of smoke shall cover the earth.’ If the wages of luxury did not find you in this life they would surely get you in the next.
Even when spices were the flavour of the age, then, their aromas were received with ambivalence. There was agreement that they smelled sensual, but sharp disagreement as to whether this was a good or a bad thing. They savoured of paradise, yet they were at the same time incitements to carnality; desire was laced with repugnance. It is particularly startling to find this sense of misgiving among those who expended the greatest energies in their acquisition. In Venice the spice trade, despite being a crucial sector of the economy, long contributed to images of a sensual, luxury-addicted city in the throes of imperial decline. Even at the apex of th
e age of discoveries, when Europeans returned to the spice lands for the first time since Roman days, there were those who detected a whiff of corruption in their aromas. Peter Martyr, the chaplain to Ferdinand and Isabella, managed at the same time to celebrate Spanish prowess in the search for spice while bewailing their pernicious, emasculating influence. Writing of Magellan’s voyage to the Moluccas, he saw no contradiction in dismissing the spices he sought as ‘delicacies which render men effeminate’. He was moreover well aware of the antiquity of the notion. Of the Moluccas themselves he said that ‘from the date of Rome’s luxury they have, so to say, glided into our ken, not without serious consequences to us; for characters soften, men become effeminate, virtue weakens, and people are seduced by these voluptuous odours, perfumes, and spices’. And yet the same corrupting spices were the point of the exercise.
It is no longer the fashion for historians to draw such moralising generalisations, yet in this case some of Peter’s assumptions still prevail, albeit less conspicuously, or less consciously. The guilt has gone, but not the premise of spices’ sensuality. For just as he saw them as voluptuous and erotically charged, so too the modern perfume industry, with its breathless promises of sophistication and seduction, remains a major consumer of spices. Calvin Klein’s Obsession contains nutmeg and clove; Opium by Yves Saint-Laurent has pepper, and there are many other such examples. Ginger, mace and cardamom are all common additives. If we are to take the advertising at face value, then spices remain as seductive as they ever were, even if we are less conscious of the fact.
Chiefly, however, modern notions of the sexiness of spice are more literary than literal, but no less real for that. In New York City there is a spice store called Aphrodisia – the name says it all. The association runs so deep as to have intruded into modern pop culture. In the mid-1990s the Spice Girls shot like a gaudy, squawking comet through the outer orbits of pop stardom before, in obedience to the Newtonian physics of celebrity, the acrimonious plummet back to earth and bust-up. Part of what made them spicy was, needless to say, their feisty sex appeal. Subliminally or otherwise, they honoured a grand tradition. Here is the entry for ‘spicy’ in the Collins English Thesaurus: ‘Aromatic, flavoursome, hot, piquant, pungent, savoury, seasoned, tangy, broad, hot, improper, indecorous, indelicate, off-colour, ribald, risqué, scandalous, sensational, suggestive, titillating, unseemly’ – all in all, not a bad summary of the discussion at hand.
Afterword, or How to Make a Small Penis Splendid
This chapter has been written in the assumption that any aphrodisiac effect of spices existed more in the mind than in the body: that their effect, if any, was a matter of belief, rather than any strictly physiological response. Considering some of the wild claims made on behalf of spices this seemed both a reasonable and a necessary working method. And there were perhaps none wilder than those made in what is in every sense the spiciest of the works on the topic mentioned above, The Perfumed Garden.
Here is a work that for once fully merits the academician’s notion of phallocentricity. For Sheikh Mohammed al-Nefzaoui, penis function and size are constant preoccupations, in which connection he cites spices in all their multifarious potency. They can be rubbed on directly – even better, so the sheikh would have it, than the melted fat of a camel’s hump, leather, hot pitch or live leeches. His advice, at times, seems rash: ‘If you would make the enjoyment still more voluptuous, masticate a little cubeb-pepper or cardamom-grains of the large species; put a certain quantity of it on the head of your member, and then go to work. This will procure for you, as well as for the woman, a matchless enjoyment.’ Spices can even inspire a woman to pack up her belongings and move in: ‘If you wish the woman to be inspired with a great desire to cohabit with you, take a little of cubebs, pyrether, *ginger and cinnamon, which you will have to masticate just before joining her; then moisten your member with your saliva and do her business for her. From that moment she will have such an affection for you that she can scarcely be without you.’
But this is small beer alongside the contents of Chapter 18, ‘Prescriptions for increasing the dimension of small members and making them splendid’. In light of the extreme importance of the topic, the author keeps this discussion for the end of the book, ‘because from a good-sized member there springs the affection and love of women’. The converse also applies: ‘Many men, solely by reason of their insignificant members are, as far as coition is concerned, objects of aversion to women.’
Fortunately a remedy is at hand:
A man … with a small member, who wants to make it grand or fortify it for the coitus, must rub it before copulation with tepid water, until it gets red and extended by the blood flowing into it, in consequence of the heat; he must then anoint it with a mixture of honey and ginger, rubbing it in sedulously. Then let him join the woman; he will procure for her such pleasure that she objects to him getting off her again. Another remedy consists in a compound made of a moderate quantity of pepper, lavender, galanga, and musk, reduced to powder, sifted, and mixed up with honey and preserved ginger. The member, after having been first washed in warm water, is then vigorously rubbed with the mixture; it will then grow large and brawny, and afford to the woman a marvellous feeling of voluptuousness.
While this is quite possibly the grandest of all aphrodisiac claims made on behalf of spices, it may just be true, if somewhat exaggerated. Alan Hirsch of Chicago’s Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Foundation has recently published a number of findings pointing to much the same conclusion, provided one substitutes for the sheikh’s ‘splendid’ augmentation the more medically conventional notion of an increase in penile blood flow. In one study Hirsch exposed male volunteers to a variety of aromas, while measuring their penile blood flow by means of a small pressure cuff. In the first, preliminary study carried out on medical students, cinnamon buns were found to produce the most dynamic response. However, when the study was repeated on a broader scale, cinnamon buns and unnamed ‘oriental spice’ paled into insignificance alongside a whopping 40 per cent increase for lavender and pumpkin pie, with doughnuts in second place at 31.5 per cent.
On the basis of his findings Hirsch has argued that scent can have a powerful impact on sexuality; and indeed his results would seem to confirm, in a minor way, the spice-sex association. They do not however settle the learned vs. innate debate, and either way doughnuts trump a spice, at least as far as the Chicago male is concerned. (Though Hirsch did find that his ‘oriental spice’ had the greatest effect on the subjects who had sexual intercourse most frequently. It may also be significant that all the volunteers for the study were recruited by advertisements on a Chicago classic rock station – arguably, a particularly doughnut-friendly demographic.)
But if the jury is still out on humans, there is a scrap of marginally more promising evidence concerning rodents, stumbled on inadvertently by a team of Saudi scientists who were looking not for aphrodisiacs but at the toxicity of cinnamon, Cinnamomum zeylanicum. Studies of this nature have long been of interest to the scientific community, anxious to determine whether the antibacterial, antimicrobial properties of spices have potential industrial or medical applications. The results would have confirmed a monk’s suspicions, and gratified the sheikh.
In this case the tests were carried out on laboratory mice. The mice were separated into three groups and fed a diet including varying quantities of cinnamon. The first group was kept as a control, and fed no spice. The second group was fed a diet high in cinnamon, and the third was practically stuffed with it, like geese fattened for foie gras.
The cinnamon-fed mice produced some interesting results. As far as toxicity was concerned, the tests suggested that the spice has very few or very mild negative effects. The control group showed no observable change, other than a substantial increase in weight – too many calories, too little scuttling about. The second group showed no major negative effect, though they did not put on weight. The third likewise showed no observable negative effect, asid
e from a minor reduction in their haemoglobin count. They also stayed thin relative to the other mice. Of greater interest was an unlooked-for side effect: the cinnamon-stuffed mice all experienced abnormal genital growth, and the males experienced dramatic increase in their sperm count. These more abundant sperm also proved to be far more motile than normal – better swimmers.
So far no similar tests on humans have been published, or none that I could find (or that seemed worth believing), but the results look promising, particularly in an age when men around the world are reported to be suffering from declining sperm counts. Somewhat belatedly, the experiment offers the first shred of scientific evidence that maybe the advocates of spice were onto something after all, not just in terms of a placebo effect, but in a deeper, physiological sense. Admittedly, there are those who might feel that abnormal genital growth and more abundant sperm are not necessarily what one looks for in an aphrodisiac, and perhaps cinnamon cannot deliver erections on demand à la Viagra. But in the real business of aphrodisiacs it might do a good deal more. Cinnamon did not exactly make of these lab mice sexual athletes so much as marathon runners. And they stayed thin, too.
* Strong spiced and sweetened wines.
* The carrot’s admirably phallic shape apparently accounts for a long-lasting reputation as an aphrodisiac.
* When Lady Macbeth returns from drugging the wine of Duncan’s guards – she calls them ‘surfeited grooms’ – she boasts ‘I have drugg’d their possets.’ Macbeth 2.2.6.