The racialized image of penis-spitting African tribesmen is as startling, perhaps, as Marten’s testicles-in-a-box anecdote, especially when contrasted to De Graaf’s medicalized penis, but it also indicates the range of an older symbolism which associated male genitalia with contexts of military victory, war trophies, or aggressive penile display.17 And the anthropological account also anticipates early modern racial stereotyping which would assign the threateningly over-sized or grotesquely infibulated penis to primitive non-white males. Certainly the phallus as scepter, weapon, or castrated trophy can be found in the seventeenth and eighteenth-century records, particularly around Charles II’s notoriously phallic reign, and, forms of priapic worship are still evident in pornographic works such as John Oldham’s Sardanapalus (late 1670s),18 Alexis Piron’s Ode à Priape (1710),19 and John Wilkes’s Veni Creator; Or, The Maid’s Prayer (1750s)20; but Pope’s culture had assigned to the penis/phallus a new role whose symbolism was about a potentially problematic masculine identity rather than externalized signs of mythical generation, military prowess, or the racially exotic and monstrous. For the ancients, both the yard and stones were relatively direct signs of status or legal character; for the moderns, signification could be a more difficult matter, especially when the relationship between groin and mental identity was viewed as an inverse or incommensurate one.
I dwell on the historical and anthropological note-taking of these Enlightenment commentators to illustrate just how self-conscious they were about the older constructions of the meaningfulness of male genitalia. In the cases of the testicles and penis, earlier representations were either no longer a part of the insistent medicalization of physiological systems within the new health sciences, or their legal, social, and military metaphors had been absorbed but largely rewritten within a newer cultural mapping of the human body as machine.21 Semen was another matter, however. Despite debates by classical medical theorists about the make-up of male seed, its genesis, and its function, older morphological models had nevertheless produced two generally agreed-upon concepts which were to be absorbed almost completely by the new physiology and its popular transmission, either literally or figuratively: semen was (along with animal spirits) one of the most spiritous and vital fluids, and therefore exceedingly important to the well-being of the male body; and the production of seed and its discharge were linked directly to the brain.22 In both instances, the moderns would medicalize and concentrate these beliefs through a newer physiology which increasingly located an essentialized maleness exclusively within the microscopic workings of the tubes, glands, tissue, and fluids of the parts of generation. The new constructs of male reproductive biology would recall the older medical symbolism while ushering in very different cultural contexts and symbolic codes.
From the earliest narratives of its essence, sperm was seen as a vital pneuma associated with heat, fire, fertile foam, and an ineffable admixture of spirit and matter.23 A liquid with a supreme generative power, seed had acquired the status of a life-force itself. The new physiology and the sexologies repeat this conceptual rhetoric with approval. On the refinement of semen in the epididymis, De Graaf writes that the watery parts of the seminal liquid “foam more as they pass through the tubules and bestow final perfection upon them, a process which we believe Hippocrates to have understood similarly to ourselves where he says that foam is of ‘the essence of semen’ ” (32); he concludes that “the most noble” semen “is a hot and humid spiritous body produced in the testicles or a body full of spirit capable of generating a soul” (44). Paraphrasing Hippocrates, Samuel Tissot’s Onanism: or, A Treatise Upon the Disorders Produced by Masturbation (4th ed., 1772) ranks “the seminal Liquor … [as] the most valuable” of bodily humors, and, with Galen’s authority, calls it “the most subtle … vital spirit…. the Essential Oil of the animal liquors” (48–9, 52). Venette’s encomium is also typical, claiming of “Sperma” that “The moisture from whence the seed is derived … is the most refined and noblest part of the human frame, containing, in itself, the whole nature and complexion of every part of the body; or in other words, being the very essence of man” (38–9). Other medical treatises offer up a similar rhetorical palette of heightened agency, privileged status, or sublime creativity: Joseph Cam’s A Practical Treatise: Or, Second Thoughts on the Consequences of the Venereal Disease (3rd ed., 1729) registers a sense of awe that “such noble Virtues are hoarded up in that Matter elaborated by the Testicles” (2); Robert James’s A Medicinal Dictionary (1745) calls semen “the Flower, and choicest Part of the Blood, and nervous Fluid”;24 and Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis’s The Earthly Venus (1753) asks whether “the seminal spirits” are “not the fire sung by poets as having been stolen from the gods by Prometheus.”25 By far the most remarkable eighteenth-century appreciation of the power of the seminal liquor is to be found in James Graham’s end-of-century A New and Curious Treatise of the Nature and Effects of Simple Earth, Water and Air (1793):
The seminal principle, or luminous, ever-active balsam of life, is the grand staff, strength, all-animating vital source or principle of the beauty, vigour and serenity, both of body and of mind. Without a full and genial tide of this rich, vivifying luminous principle, continually circulating in every part of the system, it is absolutely impossible that either man or woman can enjoy either health, strength, spirits or happiness. (27)26
The rhetorical dimension is an important aspect of how the moderns would keep alive older ideas of sperm as a male quintessence linked to a semi-divine realm of spiritual fluids. But the verbal vehicles of this conceptual tradition were carried over into the literary realm as well, where semen as a sublimely-charged synecdoche of male creativity reflected a larger tendency to equate maleness with genitalia. In one of the few successfully concluded imperfect enjoyment poems of the Restoration—an anonymous poem entitled “The Lost Opportunity Recovered,” printed in Wit and Drollery. Jovial Poems (1682)—Lysander, the premature ejaculator, returns the morning after to his Cloris (a married woman) and, “With a proud Courage and with stiffness blest, / Foaming with Love he makes to Beauty’s Lap” for a second encounter. Engaging more efficaciously this time, Lysander recovers his tumescence, ejaculates, and his paramour “wip’d away those drops of Liquid Fire.”27 Nearly a century later Claude Quillet’s The Joys of Hymen, Or, the Conjugal Directory: A Poem, in Three Books (1768) prescribed nothing less than a personal technology for the most favorable production of sperm, as well as specific recommendations about the best time for intercourse. One must avoid the venereal act after the evening meal, “Fresh from the festal board,” to allow proper time for the decoction of semen from the newly supplied blood:
For sages say, the warm and active juice,
Which purple wines and Ceres gifts produce;
The kindly strength which feeds the genial flame
Of love, or nourishes the vital frame:
All these (a rude and undigested heap)
Digestive pow’rs will ripen while you sleep;
Strain through unnumber’d tubes the flowing tide,
And blood from Chyle, and sperm from blood divide.28
According to this physiologically nuanced poet, morning is the ideal moment to discharge “love’s warm balm.” Leaving aside the timing of intercourse or the happy recoveries of premature ejaculators, however, one can easily discover a vocabulary of liquid fire, genial flame, foaming energy, or spiritous fluid permeating the seed-lingo in non-medical narratives throughout