The Allure of Sacred Prostitution

 For over 2,000 years authors Classical, Biblical, and Assyriological have maintained a belief in sacred prostitution (also called temple or cultic prostitution).  They have claimed that various societies throughout the Mediterranean and ancient Near East had institutions whereby women and men sold sex for the profit of deities and temples, either as lifetime occupations or simply as once-in-a-lifetime donations.  In the past 20 years, however, much of the evidence for this so-called institution has been shown to be more imagined than real, and belief in the practice of sacred prostitution in the west is now in sharp decline.

No longer seeing sacred prostitution as an historical reality, it now becomes feasible to study supposed references to this institution in a different light, dealing with issues of symbolic language rather than historical accuracy.  In my paper, I discuss two of the earliest perceived references to sacred prostitution in the Classical corpus -- Herodotos 1.199 and Pindar frag. 122.  The former relates how all Babylonian women, once in their lives, must have sex with a foreigner in honour of the goddess Mylitta.  The latter describes the “donation” of a group of prostitutes to the goddess Aphrodite.  A dominant theme in both passages is the conflation of religion and rape, how the manipulation of women’s sexuality in the name of a deity is used to express defeat on the part of the feminine or effeminized characters, divinization on the part of the masculine.  

In the end, I argue that, contrary to many modern perceptions, sacred prostitution does not extol sexuality or fertility as expressions of religious devotion.  Rather, the religio-sexual subjugation of the “prostitutes” serves as a metaphor for human hubris at best and tragedy at worst.

Stephanie Budin was born in the middle of the Mojave Desert in southern California, and I started studying Greek mythology in the 5th grade when I got my hands on D'Aulaire's book of Greek myths.  After originally trying to major in International Relations in Washington, D. C., I moved my focus back some 2,500 years and majored in history.  I received my Ph.D. from the Graduate Group in Ancient History at the University of Pennsylvania, where I focused on Greece and the Near East.  My main interests are sex and gender, myth and religion, and international relations.  I am
particularly interested in any topic that pulls all of these together.  I am currently writing a book on the myth of sacred prostitution.