Cabinet Secret : The Perfumed Garden

The Cabinet Secret
by Stanislas Marie César Famin

THE recollection of the past is the delight and the consolation of old age. In all times the generation about to die out has declaimed against the morals of the rising generation. This concordance of opinion having been transmitted from century to century, it might be expected that as we go back towards the epoch of the Creation we should, come to a golden age of virtue and purity. By the same reasoning, we should as we pass on in fancy to the series of centuries to come, reach an epoch of such depravity that the mind might well refuse to conceive all its enormity. But let us reassure ourselves: this is only the sport of an uneasy imagination, a weakness incidental to humanity. Civilization, far from corrupting manners, tends rather to mollify them.

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While there was yet in the world but one man and one woman, there existed between them a partnership in guilt. While there were yet only three men, there was already a hoary perjurer, a fratricide, and an innocent victim.

The Holy Scriptures, as well as the profane histories of the first and greatest peoples of the world, present nothing but a series of revolting atrocities. Nimrod founds slavery: entire populations given up to the most shameless debauchery perish by fire from heaven, and the lake Asphaltites swallows up in its poisoned waters the foul remnants of Sodom and Gomorrha; Lot lies with his own daughters; a king of Jerusalem has the feet and hands of seventy princes and nobles cut off, and makes them crawl under his table; Abimelech ascends the throne, borne on the corpses of his brothers whom he has assassinated; Aristobulus condemns his mother to die of hunger; Herod orders the children under two years of age to be massacred. Let us draw the curtain on the bloody and shameful pictures which the histories of Greece and Rome display: they have been sufficiently described.

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The Perfumed Garden
by Shaykh Nefwazi

PRAISE BE GIVEN TO God, who has placed man's greatest pleasure in the natural parts of woman, and has destined the natural parts of man to afford the greatest enjoyment to woman. He has not endowed the parts of woman with any pleasurable or satisfactory feeling until the same have been penetrated by the instrument of the male; and likewise the sexual organs of man know neither rest nor quietness until they have entered those of the female. Hence the mutual operation. There takes place between the two actors wrestling, intertwinings, a kind of animated conflict.

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What can be more important, in fact, than the study of the principles upon which rest the happiness of man and woman, by reason of their mutual relations; relations which are themselves dependent upon character, health, temperament and the constitution, all of which it is the duty of philosophers to study.

So let us praise and exalt him who has created woman and her beauties, with her appetizing flesh; who has given her hails, a beautiful figure, a bosom with breasts which are swelling, and amorous ways, which awaken desires.

The Master of the Universe has bestowed upon them the empire of seduction; all men, weak or strong, are subjected to a weakness for the love of woman. Through woman we have society or dispersion, sojourn or emigration.

The state of humility in which are the hearts of those who love and are separated from the object of their love, makes their hearts burn with love's fire; they are oppressed with a feeling of servitude, contempt and misery; they suffer under the vicissitudes of their passion: and all this as a consequence of their burning desire for contact.

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