The fourteenth book of Augustine of Hippo’s De Civitate Dei, (The City of God) is largely concerned with Augustine’s attempts to prove that such sex as Adam and Eve enjoyed before eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge was entirely free of lust and that it was only the primal couple’s disobedience that “snatched them [the sex organs] from the authority of the will.” Prior to that, Adam could have put Ron Jeremy out of business. With his member subject to his will, he could raise or lower it whenever he felt the need: “The instrument…would have sown the seed on the field of generation as the hand now sows seed on the earth.” In attempting to prove this assertion, Augustine refers to a number of people capable of unusual physical feats. I once thought of using the one below (in Latin, of course) as the epigraph to my thesis:
A number of people produce at will such musical sounds from their behind (without any stink) that they seem to be singing from that region (Henry Bettenson, translator).
The Swallows restate the idea in more colloquial form:
