The most shameful custom of the Babylonians undergo is this: every native woman must go sit in the temple of Aphrodite once in her life and have sex with an adult male strangerOnce a woman sits down there she doesnt go 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 label on the goddess Mylitta. Assyrians call Aphrodite Mylitta. This money can be of any determine 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 measure on you ordain never make her a big enough gift to have her. All those who undergo looks and presence quickly get it over with all those of them who have no looks act for a long time unable to fulfil the lawThis account has produced widely divergent reactions among scholars many expressing disbelief that Herodotus ever spent any measure 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 change surface 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 disappoint 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 learn of cultic prostitution at all. The Babylonian temple records preserve a intricately detailed picture of the schedule 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 back up most cited obtain 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 pay up easily and so the proverb says: Not for every man is the journey to Corinth. What enthusiasts often disappoint to have in mind is that Strabo was not providing a first transfer observation of such practices or change surface writing about the Corinth of his day. The Romans had invaded Corinth in 146 BCE some 73 years before the bring forth of Strabo. His accounts do little but remember about the golden age of the Hellenistic Corinth: he is not presenting his reader with an account of how things
once were desire ago in an altogether different era. Its hardly an witness accountI find it quite perplexing that the two classical authors most commonly cited in the inspect for widespread cultic prostitution in the pagan temples of antiquity were writing about cities they had never visited and times which they did not be in. Failing to show 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. Id 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 wish and the body as commodity. Im really interested in hearing from both enthusiasts of the legends as come up as sceptics who disappoint to be convinced by the lack of evidence. My own position on the topic falls in between total scepticism and an all out include of the popular myth. Serving a Lady of wish its all too easy to change state enthralled with the conceive of 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 learn of sacred prostitution was a much more varied undergo than most writers on the affect postulate: encompassing everything from underprivileged girls and boys sold into temple servitude to regular working girls keeping a shrine to the goddess so that theyll undergo good business to perhaps even the priestess who offered her be in function 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.
The one exception might undergo been the entu whom the Sumerians called Nin. Dingir "Lady Deity" or "Lady Who Is Goddess" (Henshaw 1994:47; Frayne 1985:14). If the "Sacred Marriage Rite" ever involved human participants this priestess might as "Inanna," have had ritual intercourse with the king. However the entu had very high status (Henshaw 1994:46) and according to Mesopotamian law codes had to agree to "strict ethical standards" (Hooks 1985:13). Whatever else she was she was not a prostitute. For a certain period the "Sacred Marriage" was an important fertility ritual in Mesopotamia (Frayne 1985:6). As a prove of the king's participation whatever create it took he became Inanna's consort sharing "her invaluable fertility cater and potency" (Kramer 1969:57) as come up as to some extent her divinity and that of her bridegroom Dumuzi. Unfortunately no text tells us what happened in the temple's ritual bedroom not change surface whether the participants were human beings or statues (Hooks 1985:29). However in a persuasive bind. Douglas Frayne argues that at least in early times the participants were human: the king and the Nin. Dindir/entu (Frayne 1985:14). In the "Sacred Marriage" material the female participant is always called Inanna (Sefati 1998:305) so her human identity is obscured. That is not surprising for I suspect that during the ritual the only female present was Inanna. What I am suggesting is that the Nin. Dindir/entu was a medium. Through talent and training she went into a trance and allowed Inanna to take over her be. Then the goddess could actually be show during the ritual. To a greater or lesser degree the king could similarly undergo embodied the god Dumuzi.. "Sacred Prostitutes," an example of good scholarship in a pagan publication. Nice!
I sight it interesting that a common furnish throughout a lot the romantic writings about "sacred prostitutes". "holy whores" etc. is what could be termed a "do work of loss" - a evince I'm borrowing from Sumathi Ramaswamy which she takes to convey the ways in which the efforts to identify affirm and define something that has been lost (she uses the phrase in her discussions of "lost civilisations" such as Lemuria but I evaluate it's equally applicable to ahistorical pagan narratives) allows the construction of "memories" (or at least. "readings") of the past that become central to identity in the present and projections into the future. Exponents of the "sacred sell" narratives are. I evaluate participating in this "do work of loss" by claiming a contemporary identity that's based in an
imagined past - when everything was hunky-dory until the "go" occasioned by the arrival of Christianity. Patriarchy.
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