Historia amoris; a history of love ( ancient and modern)
The first created thing was light. Then life came, then death. In between was fear. But not love. Love was absent. In Eden there was none. Adam and Eve emerged their adult. The phases of the delicate fever that others in paradise have experienced left them unaffected. Instead of the reluctance and attraction, the hesitancies and aspirations, the preliminary and common conflagrations which are the beginnings, as they are also the sacraments, of love, abruptly they were one.
They were married before they were mated. The union, entirely allegoric a Persian conceit differed, otherwise, only in the poetry of the accessories from that which elsewhere actually occurred. Primitive man was necessarily speechless, probably simian, and certainly hideous.
Women, if possible more hideous still, were joined by him momentarily and immediately forgot. Ultimately, into the desolate poverty of the rudimentary brain there crept a novelty. The novelty was an idea. Women were detained, kept in lairs, made to serve there. Further novelties ensuing, creatures that had learned from birds to talk passed from animality. Subsequent progress originated in a theory that they were very clearly entitled to whatever was not taken away from them. From that theory, all institutions proceed, primarily that of family.
Contents:
I Super Flumina Babylonis 1
II The Curtains of Solomon 10
III Aphrodite Urania 28
IV Sappho 41
V The Age of Aspasia 53
V The Age of Aspasia 53
VI The Banquet 65
VII Roma-Amor 75
VIII Antony and Cleopatra 87
IX The Imperial Orgy 97
X Finis Amoris 110
PART TWO
I The Cloister and the Heart 125
II The Pursuivants of Love 138
III The Parliaments of Joy 150
IV The Doctors of the Gay Science 164
V The Apotheosis 177
V The Apotheosis 177
VI Bluebeard 191
VII The Renaissance 198
VIII Love in the Seventeenth Century 213
IX Love in the Eighteenth Century 237
X The Law of Attraction 251