Sacred prostitution is the ancient practice of selling sexual services for the benefit of a deity. It’s a spiritual transaction–not necessarily shameful, but a transaction all the same–conducted to glorify Aphrodite, Ishtar, and whichever other goddesses felt they’d be best celebrated by sacramental hooking. Herodotus reports that “every woman of the land once in her life” would sell sex to a stranger in a temple. Men would select from among the pious, and to refuse at that point was a sin. The pretty ones completed the ritual soon enough and were free to leave, but the unfortunate looking would have to wait around for years until a man took pity and bought some action. Classicists, biblical scholars, archaeologists, historians all approach the practice from different angles and collect disparate cultural experiences under a single classification. I see here that “it is no exaggeration to say that ritual prostitution – also called temple- or sacred prostitution – was known to cultures on each and every continent of planet Earth.” Sacred prostitution brings us all together.
It’s incidental to this whole project that the practice was a myth jointly created and enriched by all of these disciplines, and only discredited in the past 10 years or so. The introduction (pdf) to Stephanie Budin’s “The Myth of Sacred Prostitution,” is a fun little case study in how these things snowball from a historian’s bit of prurient fantasy into accepted fact. Musings lodge into fertile academic minds and sprout their own evidence. Says Budin, an accomplished ancient historian and part time belly-dancer I may be in love with:
I have taken a mostly philological approach to the problem of sacred prostitution in antiquity. This is because sacred prostitution is ultimately a literary construct. Although various icons and archaeological remains have been drawn into the sacred prostitution debate, this is only because the idea of sacred prostitution already existed. For example, as we shall see in Chapter Nine, the remains of a series of rooms in Etruscan Pyrgi were identified as a sacred brothel based on written testimonia that associated the site with the cult of Phoenician Aˇstart and, independently, scorta (whores, or possibly leather bags; no one knows for sure). Erotic scenes in Mesopotamian art are commonly analyzed based on preconceived notions of sacred prostitution, inevitably misconstruing their meanings.
I’m inclined to see the hugely exaggerated statistics regarding human trafficking as driven by economic realities; sex slavery, thanks to evangelicals domestically and other social forces abroad, is where the money is. No one–least of all an NGO vying for that money–has an incentive to suggest that there are fewer victims than previously believed, or that the data suggests very few victims of trafficking are women sold into sex as opposed to men and boys forced into less titillating forms of labor; correct the misperception and you may shut off the tap. But clearly, there has to be some deeper will to believe among those who continue to parrot the now-discredited numbers.
[...] Howley informs us that the tradition of the temple prostitute . . . probably didn’t exist. By way of compensation, she’s got the best blog-entry title in dog years. Posted by Jim [...]
How are Evangelicals responsible for an increase in human trafficking /sex slavery? Have policies changed over the last 8 years, domestically, which have impacted the practice?
Hmm. So the temples of the ancient world weren’t all stuffed to overflowing with hot and eager sacred tarts?
* gives up on time-machine-building project, tosses wrench into corner in disgust, sighs, goes upstairs to watch Spanish soap operas and eat Cheetos *
Luke — I had the same response to the post that you did — “Qu’est-ce que fuck?” — but then I noticed that Kerry isn’t blaming evangelicals for an increase in sex-trafficking: she’s pointing out that evangelical NGOs (and non-evangelical NGOs) can collect more cash to counter sex-trafficking than they can collect if they work against the (equally?) horrific traffic in non-sexual labour. A great point as far as I can tell. Why can we only care about sex-trafficking? Why do we seem to care more about sex-trafficking than we care about the traffic in labour? Of course, if we start caring about the traffic in labour we might have to start worrying every time we buy a dozen pairs of tube socks for $1.
As for Budin? I think her book stinks. Why presume that documentary representations of sacred prostitution are less historically compelling than material artifacts? It’s not as if sacred prostitution requires a massive, utterly unique material infrastructure that would be left to the historical record in the form of ruins: sacred prostitutes would have worked within an existing space, they wouldn’t have had a temple, marked by purpose-built neon signs.
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Every time i come here I am not dissapointed, nice post