Thus,
according to W.H. Pearse (_Scalpel_, December, 1897), it is the
custom in Cornwall for country maids to eat the testicles of the
young male lambs when they are castrated in the spring, the
survival, probably, of a very ancient religious cult. (I have not
myself been able to hear of this custom in Cornwall.) In
Burchard's Penitential (Cap. CLIV, Wasserschleben, op. cit., p.
660) seven years' penance is assigned to the woman who swallows
her husband's semen to make him love her more. In the seventeenth
century (as shown in William Salmon's _London Dispensatory_,
1678) semen was still considered to be good against witchcraft
and also valuable as a love-philter, in which latter capacity its
use still survives. (Bourke, _Scatalogic Rites_, pp. 343, 355.)
In an earlier age (Picart, quoted by Crawley, _The Mystic Rose_,
p. 109) the Manichaeans, it is said, sprinkled their eucharistic
bread with human semen, a custom followed by the Albigenses.
The belief, perhaps founded in experience, that semen possesses
medical and stimulant virtues was doubtless fortified by the
ancient opinion that the spinal cord is the source of this fluid.
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