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Sukhapadma Asana (Lotus Posture)

 

Tom Mellish
OP Contributor

The word pornography comes from the ancient Greek pornographos “writing
about harlots”, from porne “harlot” and graphos “to write”. Pornographos refers to
the short and suggestive messages that prostitutes used to write on walls and the
like, advertising their services.

The original perspective of prostitution was. that it was linked with fertility worship.
Sex was seen as something holy and profound, and the feminine was worshipped.
Ironically it was the women members of the so-called “oldest profession’, prostitu-
tion, who in many societies had a certain amount of freedom and even influence.
Prostitutes were respectable members of the temple. Through sex with a sacred
prostitute, worshippers paid homage to their gods. Part of the prostitutes’ value was
that their earnings contributed substantially to the temples’ income. Temple prosti-
tutes were common in Greece, Rome, and India.

In Pompeii, Italy, a brothel was unearthed containing a number of small rooms
with built-in stone beds, which would have been covered with pillows and mattress.
In the hallway, overhead are numerous fresco paintings of couples in a variety of
sexual positions. Pompeii was a shipping and merchant town which would have
been full of sailors of different nationalities at any given time. The pictures would
have been a convenient way to specify the type of activity desired, transcending the
need for language.

The streets of Pompeii have phalli of different types carved onto buildings, and
along the street itself, possibly to lead customers to the numerous brothels. Erotic
paintings embellished the private homes of many wealthy persons. One of the most
famous is of Priapus weighing his enormous penis against a bag of gold.

The Villa of the Mysteries is interesting in that no one knows exactly what the pur-
pose was, or how the paintings there were perfectly preserved. The paintings sug-
gest that it was a place, which celebrated the Dionysos rituals, forbidden by Rome
as too socially disruptive, but nevertheless practiced in outlying areas such as
Pompeii. We do not know exactly what the ritual involved. There is a depiction of
dancers and new initiates, and the scene of a costumed and winged woman who
holds a whip over the hopeful ones. A woman cowers in fear, and an older man
whispers into the ear of a younger man.

The most famous sex manual in Rome was Ovid’s Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love).
Renaissance humanists praised the book. It begins with the words “If anyone
among this people know not the art of loving let him read my poem and having read
be skilled in love. By skill swift ships are sailed and rowed, by skill nimble chariots
are driven: by skill must love be guided.” Ovid’s Art of Love is a poem composed in
three parts. The first instructs men how to win a mistress, the second tells how to
hold onto her and the last contains instructions for women on how to satisfy the
men. “Lie on your back, if your face and all of your features are pretty,’ reads the
text. “If your posterior’s cute, better be seen from behind.”

In Greece, caricatured as a “reign of the Phallus”, the lascivious vase paintings
such as “Hetaera mounting youth, on oenoche by Shuvalov painter’ and “Couple,
on cup by Wedding painter” were depictions of men with slaves and prostitutes. Sex
with wives was not shown.

Such divinities such as Hermes, Pan and the satyrs of Dionysos were common-
ly represented in an ithyphallic (erect) state. A herm, for example, was a pillar in
which only the head of Hermes, the penis, and the testicles are carved. Herms
decorated many homes and most crossroads, pointing the way for weary travelers.
Depictions of herms also showed up in vase paintings; one such painting shows a
bird who has lit on an unusually exaggerated herm, apparently with amorous intent

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