In this episode, the lost and exhausted Poliphilo has been found by five pretty young nymphs, whose Greek names refer to the five external or special senses of the body: hearing, sight, taste, touch and smell. Nymphs are vital spirits, who represent the life force which circulates through living things like sap through a tree, or fluids through a body.
They are gaily making their way to bathe at the Bath House, a beautiful garden pavilion of milk-white marble, roofed with a crystal dome, and so they take Poliphilo with them. Despite his initial embarrassment at being so dirty in front of such attractive girls, they all bathe together in the delicious thermal spring waters scented with incense, and then after they have dressed their hair, they offer to rub Poliphilo’s body down with a special liniment supposed to revive his ailing strengths. As they do so, they sing to him about a metamorphosis that takes place in Apuleius’ novel, The Golden Ass, Chapter 16-17, in which a man pilfers a magic ointment meant to transform him into a wise old owl, but mistakes the box, and is changed instead into an ass. (p.85-6 in the Adelphi facsimile)
“In its little frieze there was an inscription in an elegant inscription of Attic formulation: HUMOUR
“After a lot of playful laughter once everyone had bathed and washed, with plenty of gentle and charming little amorous words, and girlish jokes and cajolery, we surfaced from the thermal waters, bounding up the dry steps with great carousing in tripudium and festivity. There they anointed themselves with fragrant aromatic powders, daubed themselves with myristic balsam, and to me as well they offered a little box of some kind of lenitive unction, and anointed me. Something like this salubrious lotion really came at just the right moment for me, since beyond its wonderful gentleness, it seemed especially beneficial to my limbs which had been enervated by my recent flight from such danger. Afterwards once we were all fully dressed, with them dallying for a rather long time about their nymphish toilette, smoothing themselves out, and applying cosmetics. Then in enthusiastic haste, they familiarly opened containers of comfits of the greatest delicacy. They nibbled at them soothingly, and so did I, then a precious drink followed.”
Our hero feels grateful that he can finally relax after his perilous flight. Soon afterwards, however, Poliphilo suddenly finds himself in the grip of a terrific priapism, accompanied by raging lust. The nymphs tease him relentlessly for some time about his arousal, then eventually take pity on his condition.
The Platonist Apuleius’ tale (also called The Metamorphoses) exaggerates how the transmigrating soul falls into embodiment, instead of sprouting wings. Poliphilo’s similarly mistaken expectation fills his body with surges of overwhelming appetite, expressed as sexual desire for the pleasures of the Senses. The Phrygian mode of their song is that to which Lucian ascribes sacred madness, to entheon. Madmen, seers, poets, and all persons in a state of rapture, were said to be ‘caught by the nymphs’. Hence Poliphilo becomes nympholeptic with erotic madness. He quickly realizes that the unguent is a potent aphrodisiac, and finds himself with an erection he can’t quell.
In a parallel to Apuleius’ story, in which the ass must eat a rose to change back into human shape, the Senses offer him the choice of three different herbs as an antidote.
“Once they had tempered their gentle laughter, most tenderly taking pity on me there nearby the drenched and growing green banks of a streaming current, on its shallow and winding ornamental banks. There close at hand were periwinkles, and valerian, with floating willow, and an abundance of vivacious aquatic simples.
“One of them called Taste, indulgently bending over picked some heraclea nymphea, and an arrowroot, and starwort, which were all sprouting quite close to one another, and with a laugh offered them to me, that I should choose whichever of these I pleased, and eat my way to freedom.
For this reason, I turned down the nymphaea, rejected the dragon for being too caustic, and took some of the starflower. And when it had been rinsed clean, she convinced me to take a bite. Not long after that, my venereal lubricity and provocative torment left me, and my libidinous imbalance was quenched. Then once these frolicking ladies had amused themselves in this eloquent and facetious manner, and with my allurements of the flesh bridled, before long we arrived at an absolutely delightful remarkable place.”
Poliphilo’s three plants in Renaissance Natural History.
The magical ointment of Apuleius’ tale is meant to help the soul grow the wings of ascent, by way of the owlish wisdom of Athena-Minerva. The ass (or in Poliphilo’s case his obscene disorder) represents the laughably brutish corporeality of the body which results from an attempted induction into the mysteries by someone with improper knowledge — the data of the senses alone. Poliphilo beats the rap by engaging in the word magic of hermeneutics.
In his retelling of the episode, Poliphilo refers to these three plants by different names or synonyms, which are of course not necessarily the names they go by today. However, even in English translation some of the resonance of the names is maintained. The names ring with the events of the story as well as the preoccupations of Neoplatonism regarding the journey of the soul. While the two rejected plants have names recollecting the dragon, the nymphs, Hercules (in Greek: Heracles), and Cupid’s arrows, the accepted plant has a name that recalls the returning soul’s ascent to its star, the aster.
Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History, provides the reputed properties of herbs and other plants as well as alternative names used for them. Heraclea Nymphaea recombines the names of the nymphs with Hercules-Poliphilo. But the name of the waterlily also fits into the larger literary game of the Hypnerotomachia: Pliny specifies that Heracleus was a name given both to the touchstone and the lodestone or magnet: primary symbolism for universal sympathy, or the attraction of like to like. Its medical properties are antipathetic to sexual activity: “Nymphaea heraclia [sic] … takes away altogether sexual desire; a single draught of it does so for forty days; sexual dreams too are prevented if it is taken in drink on an empty stomach or eaten with food. Applied to the genitals the root also checks not only desire but also excessive accumulation of semen;” and “those who have taken it in drink for twelve days are incapable of intercourse and procreation.”
See also Eustache le Sueur's 1645 painting here.
Poliphilo’s final choice is the amella, a kind of aster, the Italian starwort or starflower. In his Georgics, Vergil describes the blossom:
“Golden is the disk, but in the petals, streaming profusely round, there is crimson gleam amid the dark violet. Often with its woven garlands have the gods' altars been decked…”
Pliny provides the reason for Poliphilo’s choice of this herb, identifying aster amellus with a plant called inguinalis, literally ‘groinwort’, indicating its power over the genitals. Poliphilo’s decision is based on this sympathy, and we can further appreciate the rinsing of the aster as a hieroglyph for the purifying of his genitals, even before he places it in his mouth.
