Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Ancient World

Sacred Prostitution in the First Person

Sacred Prostitution in the First Person stephanie l. budin This paper reconsiders the evidence for sacred prostitution in the classical corpus. It takes as a departure point the recent Near Eastern scholarship that shows that sacred prostitution never existed in the ancient Near East but rather was a fabricated idea based on allegations made by classical authors and mistranslation by scholars of cultic terminology . Rather than seeing sacred prostitution as an historical reality, I consider Biblical scholar Robert Oden’s suggestion that it was an accusation , a literary motif used by one society to denigrate another, and test this suggestion against the notion of firsthand accounts of sacred prostitution , whereby a society recounts the existence of sacred prostitution in its own time and culture; thus, sacred prostitution in the “first person .” If a society freely claims sacred prostitution as one of its own cultural institutions, the hypothesis of accusatorial, literary motif must be abandoned. However, as the evidence will show, there are, in fact, no known firsthand accounts of sacred prostitution in the ancient world. Those apparent examples from the classical world are either misinterpretations of classical authors, or, as with the Near Eastern evidence, mistranslations of certain terminology. In the end the evidence supports the idea that sacred prostitution never existed in the ancient world. 77 78 stephanie l. budin What Is “Sacred Prostitution”? As it is currently understood, sacred prostitution in the ancient world was the sale of a person’s body for sexual purposes where some portion (if not all) of the money received for this transaction went to a deity. In the Near East, this deity is usually understood to have been Ishtar or Astarte; in Greece, it was Aphrodite. At least three separate types of sacred prostitution are recorded in the classical sources. One is a onetime prostitution or sale of virginity in honor of a goddess. Our earliest testimonial of such a practice is recorded in Herodotus 1.199: The most shameful of the customs among the Babylonians is this: it is necessary for every local woman to sit in the sanctuary of Aphrodite once in her life and “mingle” with a foreign man. But many, thinking highly of themselves because of their wealth do not deign to interact with the others, and they set themselves before the sanctuary, having arrived in covered chariots, with many a maidservant in tow. But the majority act thus: in the temenos of Aphrodite many women sit wearing a garland of string about their heads. Some come forward, others remain in the background. The foreigners have straight passages in all directions through the women, by which they might pass through and make their selection. Once a woman sits there, she may not return home until one of the foreigners tossing money into her lap should mingle with her outside the sanctuary . And in tossing he must say thus: “I summon you by the goddess Mylitta .” The Assyrians call Aphrodite Mylitta. The money may be of any amount; it may not be rejected: it is not their custom, for the money is sacred. The woman follows the first man who tossed her money; she may not reject anyone. When she should have mingled, having discharged her obligation to the goddess , she leaves for home, and after this time no one might take her, no matter how great the gifts might be that he offers. Those who are attractive and tall go home quickly, while those who are homely wait about a long time, being unable to fulfill the law—some among them wait about for three or four years. And in some areas of Cyprus the custom is similar to this.1 A second type of sacred prostitution involves women (and men?) who are professional prostitutes and who are owned by a deity or a deity’s sanctuary. Thus Strabo (6.2.6) says of Eryx: “Inhabited also is Eryx, a lofty hill, possessing a highly honored sanctuary of Aphrodite in times of old replete with female hierodules whom many from Sicily and elsewhere dedicated in fulfillment of vows. But now, just as the settlement itself so too the sanctuary is depopulated, and most of the holy bodies have left.”2 Finally, there are references to a temporary type of sacred prostitution, where the women (and men?) are either prostitutes for a limited period of time before being married or only prostitute themselves during certain...