Les Diableries Erotiques
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Les Diableries Erotiques are a series of lithographs by French artist Eugène le Poitevin, depicting devils and other diabolic creatures engaging in various shenanigans on young girls. Circa 1830s.
As Paul Rumsey noted, the phallus bird creature by Poitevin is very similar to a Roman bronze tintinnabulum from the 1st century AD. It has three little bells on chains which hang from the tip of the phallus and the tips of both wings. There are a number of these creatures, (phallus men, animals and birds) reproduced in the book Sex or Symbol, erotic images of Greece and Rome by Catherine Johns. There is also this amusing quote from the Malleus Maleficarum. “And what then is to be thought of those witches who in this way sometimes collect male organs in great numbers, as many as twenty or thirty members together, and put them in a bird’s nest, or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like living members, and eat oats and corn, as has been seen by many and is a matter of common report?
For a certain man tells us that, when he had lost his member, he approached a known witch to ask her to restore it to him. She told the afflicted man to climb a certain tree, and that he might take which he liked out of a nest in which there were several members. And when he tried to take a big one, the witch said : You must not take that one; adding, because it belonged to a parish priest.”
There is a 1971 edition with a preface Roland Villeneuve, published by Éditions du Manoir, 1971, 47 pages.
Penises and vaginas fly through the air
Remarkably, the writeup on a Eugène le Poitevin in Erotic Art of the Masters the 18th, 19th, 20th Centuries Art & Artists , author and editor Bradley Smith notes
- "penises and vaginas fly through the air fly through the air like butterflies, are gathered in baskets and, personified, play games with adults and children."
This quote echoes the following by Deleuze and Guattari,
- "Flying anuses, speeding vaginas, there is no castration" (A Thousand Plateaus, p. 32).
A similarly themed print is Francesco Parmigianino's A Witch Riding on a Phallus.
