A lavishly illustrated history of aphrodisiacs, erotic botany and laundry list of ways humans have walked up to plants asking 'hey, i wonder if you do this'. 

Christian Rätsch glosses and glides across ancient medicine, folklore, ritual, religion and ethnobotany, tracing the cultural lives of plants that function to us as erotic technologies. Turns out there are so many things believed capable of changing the body, opening perception, intensifying sensation or mediating between sex and the sacred.

The book ranges widely through traditions from Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, plush with information with mythology, historical medical practice and accounts of ceremonial use. Garlic, datura, wine, hemp, spices, roots, flowers and psychoactive plants all appear here alongside Tantric practices, fertility rites, love magic and older theories of the body. There is a pharmacological side, but entangled deeply with mythos, showing the point where a plant’s chemical effect, symbolic meaning and cultural reputation become almost impossible to separate. Dense with botanical illustrations, artworks and archival imagery, it sits somewhere between reference book, cultural history and beautifully eccentric compendium.

Ten Speed Press, 1997. Large-format illustrated paperback. Very good used condition with light shelf wear.