Stupid religion question- which old religions featured the sacred prostitute tradition prominently?
I know I've run into the thing numerous times in, basically, Bible study-type discussions regarding the bans on homosexuality. Nutshell: in Leviticus (Book of Religious Law), the homosexuality ban is stated in a context that puts it not with other forms of sexual/marital immorality, but with religious abominations & idolatry.
I *think* the phenomenon was a feature of Hellenic Middle East & Egyptian religion.
Wikipedia has more:
It was revered highly among Sumerians and Babylonians. In ancient sources (Herodotus, Thucydides) there are many traces of hieros gamos, starting perhaps with Babylon, where each woman had to reach, once a year, the sanctuary of Militta (Aphrodite or Nana/Anahita), and there have sex with a foreigner, as a sign of hospitality, for a symbolic price.
A similar type of prostitution was practiced in Cyprus (Paphos) and in Corinth, Greece, where the temple counted more than a thousand prostitutes (hyerodules), according to Strabo. It was widely in use in Sardinia and in some of the Phoenician cultures, usually in honour of the goddess ‘Ashtart. Presumably by the Phoenicians, this practice was developed in other ports of the Mediterranean Sea, such as Erice (Sicily), Locri Epizephiri, Croton, Rossano Vaglio, and Sicca Veneria. Other hypotheses regard Asia Minor, Lydia, Syria and Etruscans.
It was common in Israel too, but some prophets, like Hosea and Ezekiel, strongly fought it; it is assumed that it was part of the cults of Canaan, where a significant proportion of prostitutes were male (roughly the same proportion as there were men in society at large, i.e. about 50%).
According to the Bible, the Canaanite peoples had a system of religious prostitution. This is seen, for example, in Genesis 38:21, where Judah asks Canaanite men of Adulam "Where is the harlot, that was openly by the way side?". The Hebrew original employs the word "kedsha" in Judah's question, as opposed to the standard Hebrew "zonah". The word "Kidsha" is derived from the root KaDeSh, which signifies uniqueness and holiness; thus it possibly represents a religious prostitute, although it may be that the same rootword for 'holiness', KaDeSh, is used to express lasciviousness, being that both holiness and promiscuity can be described as 'separate', which is the real meaning of that root word.
Also sites Athenian brothels that financed temples to Aphrodite (not exactly the same thing, I think, but hey) and Indian devadasi.
More from a Christian lunatic perspective, linking hierodules (temple prostitutes) to, of all things, the Olympic torch. I kinda doubt their historical facts, but the linguistics do seem to match up.
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On the Conan thing, behold the high weirdness of Robert E. Howard:
One day in February 1932, while taking an after-lunch siesta in Rio Grande City, "Howard dreamed he was sitting by a campfire out on the prairie when out of the darkness stepped a barbarian wearing (black) chain-mail armor and a horned helmet."
By Robert's own account, the entity said, "I am Conan, a Cimmerian. I wish to tell you of my adventures."
Upon awakening, "Howard decided to write a series of prehistoric adventure fantasies, not unlike (his 1929) Kull stories, for such a setting would eliminate the need for accurate historical research."
Unknown to Robert, however, a similar "contact" had already taken place three years earlier, in 1929, in Bucuresti (Bucharest), Romania.
"Awakened from a sound sleep in his apartment," journalist Corneliu "Codreanu was confronted by a glowing entity in knightly armor that identified itself as 'St. Michael the Archangel.'"
The self-styled "archangel" ordered Codreanu to go to Jassy, the site of the Romanian Army's last stand in World War One, and raise a new military force to save the nation. Thus was born the Legion of St. Michael the Archangel, also known as the Iron Guard, which played a key role in the Holocaust during World War Two.
(Editor's Comment: The experiences of REH and Codreanu, along with Antonio Rivera's nighttime visit from a quadruped alien in Barcelona in 1930, certainly qualify this period as "the Era of Strange Contacts.")
"Since Howard was not good at inventing names, he often based personal and place names on historical figures and localities. He liked to assume that ancient and medieval names were derived from those of his imagined prehistoric realms, postulating that the records of the prehistoric civilization had been destroyed by invasion or natural catastrophe, surviving only in myths and legends. He wrote, 'If some cataclysm of nature were to destroy that civilization, remnants of what knowledge and stories of its greatness might well evolve into the fantastic fables that have descended to us.'"
There's more strangeness at the link.
With more (and more tenuous) Howard strangeness here, linking his strange "somnambulist states" to similar sleep-trances experienced by Edgar Rice Burroughs, during which both of them "dreamed" about reptile-men, here, getting more into the trance-channeling thing, here with a past-life recall that may describe some recently discovered Mesopotamian pyramids, and here, where we dig into Howard's possible previous life as one John Kirby O'Donnel. After being reincarnated from a prior life in Atlantis, of course.
The reading dovetailed with a recurring dream--or nightmare--Robert had, of being a Bronze Age warrior walking the stony streets of Poseidonis, the reputed capital of the lost continent of Atlantis, who had lost the woman he loved to his best friend.
Drawing on this reading, Robert also wrote Lovecraft that he once been a trooper in the Seventh Cavalry--a former Confederate soldier (from Texas, naturally--J.T.) who had "found a home in the Army" after the American Civil War and who had been killed in Montana during the Sioux War of 1876.
And that brings us to John Kirby O'Donnel, who may or may not have been the immediately previous incarnation of Robert E. Howard.
This character, sometimes referred to as "John O'Donnel," "Black John O'Donnel," "Kirby O'Donnell" or "the Black Bear," appeared in only three short stories published in Robert's lifetime. These were "Children of the Night," which appeared in Weird Tales for April-May 1931 (and which incidentally won an O. Henry Memorial Award as one of the best stories of 1931--J.T.), and "The Treasures of Tartary" and "Swords of Shahrazar," which appeared in Oriental Stories in 1932. Robert wrote several other pastiches about O'Donnel, but these did not sell.
...His next appearance, in the unpublished story "The Black Bear Bites," finds him in Hankow (one of the cities on the Yangtze River that makes up China's Tri-Cities of Wuhan--J.T.). When his friend and fellow American, Bill Lannon, is found dead, John goes looking for the killer at the riverfront estate belonging to a Chinese smuggler, Yun Yotai....
John is detected and captured by Yun's men. But before he can be killed, the riverfront estate is raided by the Chinese police. Yun and the lama are killed. And when Chinese policeman Kang Yao unmasks the black-robed figure, "the skin beneath the mask was neither yellow nor brown, the Black Lama was a white man," a European described earlier in the story as a "sophisticated clubman."
(Editor's Comment: The irony here is that it is John O'Donnel himself who turns out to be Yog-Sothoth's instrument of vengeance.)
But what's really weird about "The Black Bear Bites" is that the police raid in the story actually happened. And it happened a little over a year before Robert E. Howard was born in Texas.
In 1904, several secret societies in China were plotting against the Manchu dynasty, with support from the Grand Orient (Masonic) Lodge of Paris, most notably the Ko Lao Hui (Translated: Elder Brothers Society) and the Tung Zhou Hui (Translated: Society Against the Common Enemy).
According to The Cambridge History of China, "In Hupei (province), a student revolutionary named Wu Luchen, who had graduated from a Japanese military academy, returned home to serve in the government's New Army. He then used his influence to obtain positions in the military for some of his comrades and to agitate among the troops. His friends held meetings at schools in various parts of the province, where they preached revolution and distributed copies of radical journals and tracts. By the summer of 1904, they had a thriving organization, which they called the Institute for the Diffusion of Science (Ko Zhueh Puzhi So, my thanks to Chen Jilin--J.T.) in order to masquerade as a study society."
"An ambitious plot was designed for simultaneous uprisings in six cities in Hunan, and it was hoped these could be coordinated with similar efforts in Hupei, Szechwan, Kiangsi, Nanking and Shanghai. It cannot be determined precisely how far these plans got, although they at least chose a date (the empress dowager's seventieth birthday, which fell on 16 November 1904); but in late October (1904) government agents learned of the plot and promptly acted to crush it."
So it appears that Freemasonry sent their agent, Eric Brand, the "sophisticated clubman," to give the Chinese rebels an assist. The weapons in Yun's warehouse probably came from a French Foreign Legion depot in neighboring Vietnam. And the "Black Lama" masquerade was Eric Brand's idea to help bring in some more recruits. But the plot failed, and Masonic revolution in China had to wait another six years for Dr. Sun Yatsen's uprising of October 10, 1910.
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