The Talmud calls the
labia minora the doors, the labia majora hinges, and the clitoris the key.
The Greeks appear not only to have found in the myrtle-berry, the fruit of
a plant sacred to Venus, the image of the clitoris, but also in the rose
an image of the feminine labia; in the poetic literature of many
countries, indeed, this imagery of the rose may be traced in a more or
less veiled manner.[5]
The widespread symbolism of sex arose in the theories and conceptions of
primitive peoples concerning the function of generation and its nearest
analogies in Nature; it was continued for the sake of the vigorous and
expressive terminology which it furnished both for daily life and for
literature; its final survivals were cultivated because they furnished a
delicately aesthetic method of approaching matters which a growing
refinement of sentiment made it difficult for lovers and poets to approach
in a more crude and direct manner. Its existence is of interest to us now
because it shows the objective validity of the basis on which erotic
symbolism, as we have here to understand it, develops. But from first to
last it is a distinct phenomenon, having a more or less reasoned and
intellectual basis, and it scarcely serves in any degree to feed the
sexual impulse.
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