Popular among neo-pagans and modern devotees of the myriad goddesses of sex, love and desire is the myth of antiquity’s golden age of sacred prostitution: a legendary time, long ago, when women sold their bodies in veneration of the goddess, and any man could achieve communion with her so long as he paid the right price. The primal scene in this story is Herodotus’ Babylon, or rather a musing on the sexual customs of neo-Babylonia in the 6th century BCE:
The most shameful custom of the Babylonians have is this: every native woman must go sit in the temple of Aphrodite, once in her life, and have sex with an adult male stranger…Once a woman sits down there, she doesn’t return home until a stranger drops money into her lap and has sex with her outside the temple. When he drops it, he has to say, “I call on the goddess Mylitta”. Assyrians call Aphrodite Mylitta. This money can be of any value at all- it is not refused, for that is forbidden, for this money becomes sacred. She follows the first one who drops the money and rejects none. When she has had sex, she has performed her religious dues to the goddess and goes home; and from that time on you will never make her a big enough gift to have her. All those who have looks and presence quickly get it over with, all those of them who have no looks wait for a long time unable to fulfil the law…
This account has produced widely divergent reactions among scholars, many expressing disbelief that Herodotus ever spent any time in Babylon, for it is widely know that the extent of his travels is generally exaggerated, and the veracity of his writings widely questioned. Yet many neo-pagans credit his account, taking it for granted that such customs were generally prevalent in the Near East, and even speculating that all great cities in the region featured temple / brothel complexes, complete with resident prostitutes sacred to a Love goddess- often subsumed in modern writings under the names of Ishtar, Inanna, Ashtoreth or Astarte.
Yet the copious temple records from Hellenistic Babylonia generally fail to convince researchers of the existence of such organised cults, much less a custom of ritual prostitution embracing the entire female population of Babylon, or more generally for any large scale practice of cultic prostitution at all. The Babylonian temple records preserve a intricately detailed picture of the calendar, timetable and agenda of the various temple complexes, and there is no trace of the organisation, accounts, housing and so forth that would be required by a large scale cult of temple prostitutes.
The second most cited source when referring to sacred prostitution in antiquity is the Greek writer Strabo, who lived some 400 years after Herodotus, and wrote on the legendary sexual customs of Corinth:
The temple of Aphrodite was so rich that it had acquired more than a thousand hierodule whores, dedicated by both men and women to the goddess. And because of them, the city used to be jam-packed and got wealthy. The ship-captains would spend up easily, and so the proverb says: ‘Not for every man is the voyage to Corinth’.
What enthusiasts often fail to mention is that Strabo was not providing a first hand observation of such practices, or even writing about the Corinth of his day. The Romans had invaded Corinth in 146 BCE, some 73 years before the birth of Strabo. His accounts do little but reminisce about the golden age of the Hellenistic Corinth: he is not presenting his reader with an account of how things are but a fantastical description of how things once were long ago in an altogether different era.
It’s hardly an eyewitness account…
I find it quite perplexing that the two classical authors most commonly cited in the case for widespread cultic prostitution in the pagan temples of antiquity were writing about cities they had never visited, and times which they did not live in. Failing to uncover primary Assyrian sources, enthusiasts cling even tighter to these secondary Greek accounts, written by men, and primarily for the male readers of their day. Female accounts of these practices are absolutely unheard of.
I’d like to put this topic out for discussion in the Temple: it brings up all kinds of interesting issues concerning gender, sexuality, religion, history, the politics of desire and the body as commodity. I’m really interested in hearing from both enthusiasts of the legends, as well as sceptics who fail to be convinced by the lack of evidence.
My own position on the topic falls in between total scepticism and an all out embrace of the popular myth. Serving a Lady of Desire, it’s all too easy to become enthralled with the fantasy of a golden age of sacred sex. My own Lady is a patroness of prostitutes, not in antiquity but in modern times. I speculate that in actuality, the practice of sacred prostitution was a much more varied experience than most writers on the subject postulate: encompassing everything from underprivileged girls and boys sold into temple servitude, to regular working girls keeping a shrine to the goddess so that they’ll have good business, to perhaps even the priestess who offered her body in service of the mysteries. Who knows, really?
By the way, I know there are few classics scholars out there among you posters: your thoughts and textual references are especially appreciated. |
