Sacred prostitution, temple prostitution, cult prostitution, and religious prostitution are purported rites consisting of paid intercourse performed in the context of religious worship, possibly as a form of fertility rite or divine marriage (). Scholars prefer the terms "sacred sex" or "sacred sexual rites" in cases where payment for services is not involved.
The historicity of literal sacred prostitution, particularly in some places and periods, is a controversial topic within the academic world. Historically mainstream historiography has considered it a probable reality, based on the abundance of ancient sources and chroniclers detailing its practices, although it has proved harder to differentiate between true prostitution and sacred sex without remuneration. Beginning in the late 20th century, a number of scholars have challenged the veracity of sacred prostitution as a concept, suggesting that the claims are based on mistranslations, misunderstandings or outright inventions of ancient authors. Authors have also interpreted evidence as secular prostitution administered in the temple under the patronage of fertility deities, not as an act of religious worship by itself.Gerda Lerner, The Origin of Prostitution in Ancient Mesopotamia, Signs 11, 1986
Definitions Sacred prostitution has many different characteristics depending on the region, class and the religious ideals of the period and the place, and consequently can have many different definitions.
Historian Stephanie Budin offers one definition: "Sacred prostitution is the sale of a person’s body for sexual purposes where some portion (if not all) of the money or goods received for this transaction belongs to a deity." Budin references three types of such sacred prostitution references in Classical sources: once-in-a-lifetime and/or sale-of-virginity prostitution to honor a goddess, professional prostitutes owned by a deity's sanctuary or the deity itself, and temporary prostitution before marriage or for certain rituals.
Ancient Near East
Ancient Near Eastern societies along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers featured many shrines and temples or houses of heaven dedicated to various deities. The 5th-century BCE historian Herodotus's account and some other testimony from the Hellenistic Period and Late Antiquity suggest that ancient societies encouraged the practice of sacred sexual rites not only in Babylonia and Cyprus, but throughout the Near East.
The work of gender researchers like Daniel Arnaud, Julia Assante and Stephanie Budin has cast the whole tradition of scholarship that defined the concept of sacred prostitution into doubt. Budin regards the concept of sacred prostitution as a myth, arguing that the practices described in the sources were misunderstandings of either non-remunerated ritual sex or non-sexual religious ceremonies, or possibly even invented as rhetorical devices.
Sumer Through the twentieth century, scholars generally believed that a form of sacred marriage rite (hieros gamos) was staged between the kings in the ancient Near Eastern region of Sumer and the high priestesses of Inanna, the Sumerian goddess of sexual love, fertility, and warfare, later called Ishtar. The king would have sex with the priestess to represent the union of Dumuzid with Inanna. According to the noted Assyriologist Samuel Noah Kramer, the kings would further establish their legitimacy by taking part in a ritual sexual act in the temple of the fertility goddess Ishtar every year on the tenth day of the New Year festival Akitu.
However, no certain evidence has survived to prove that sexual intercourse was included, despite many popular descriptions of the habit. It is possible that these unions never occurred but were embellishments to the image of the king; hymns which praise Ancient Near Eastern kings for coupling with the goddess Ishtar often speak of them as running , offering sacrifices, feasting with the sun-god Utu, and receiving a royal crown from An, all in a single day. Some modern historians argue in the same direction, though their posture has been disputed.
Babylonia According to Herodotus, the rites performed at these temples included sexual intercourse, or what scholars later called sacred sexual rites:
The British anthropologist James Frazer accumulated citations to prove this in a chapter of his magnum opus The Golden Bough (1890–1915),; see also the more extensive treatment . Frazer's argument and citations are reproduced in slightly clearer fashion by and this has served as a starting point for several generations of scholars. Frazer and Henriques distinguished two major forms of sacred sexual rites: temporary rite of unwed girls (with variants such as dowry-sexual rite, or as public defloration of a bride), and lifelong sexual rite. However, Frazer took his sources mostly from authors of Late Antiquity (i.e. 150–500 AD), not from the Classical or Hellenistic periods.Herodotus and Strabo are the only sources mentioned by Frazer that were active prior to the 2nd century AD; his other sources include Athenaeus, pseudo-Lucian, Aelian, and the Christian church historians Sozomen and Socrates of Constantinople. This raises questions as to whether the phenomenon of temple sexual rites can be generalised to the whole of the ancient world, as earlier scholars typically did.
In Hammurabi's code of laws, the rights and good name of female sacred sexual priestesses were protected. The same legislation that protected married women from slander applied to them and their children. They could inherit property from their fathers, collect income from land worked by their brothers, and dispose of property. These rights have been described as extraordinary, taking into account the role of women at the time.
Terms associated with temple prostitution in Sumer and Babylonia All translations are sourced from the Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary. Akkadian terms were used in the Akkadian Empire, Assyria, and Babylonia. The terms themselves come from lexical profession lists on tablets dating back to the Early Dynastic period.
English Sumerian Akkadian Signs Cuneiform Abbess nin-diĝir ēntu SAL.TUG2.AN 𒊩𒌆𒀭 Priestess lukur nadītu SAL.ME 𒊩𒈨 Nun nugig qadištu NU.GIG 𒉡𒍼 Hierodule Priestess nubar kulmašītu NU.BAR 𒉡𒁇 Cult Prostitute amalu ištaru GA2×AN.LUL 𒂼𒈜 A Class of Women sekrum sekretu ZI.IG.AŠ 𒍣𒅅𒀸 Prostitute geme2karkid harīmtu SAL×KURTE.A.KID 𒊩𒆳𒋼𒀀𒆤 Prostitute (EDIIIb) geme2karkid harīmtu SAL×KURTE.A.AK 𒊩𒆳𒋼𒀀𒀝 Notes on the cuneiform: by convention Akkadian is italicised, spoken Sumerian is lowercase and cuneiform sign transliteration is uppercase. In addition, a determinative sign is written as a superscript. Determinatives are only written and never spoken. In spoken Sumerian homophones are distinguished by a numerical subscript.
Hittites The Hittites practiced sacred prostitution as part of a cult of deities, including the worship of a mated pair of deities, a bull god and a lion goddess, while in later days it was the mother-goddess who became prominent, representing fertility, and (in Phoenicia) the goddess who presided over human birth.
Phoenicia It has been argued that sacred prostitution, worked by both males and females, was a custom of ancient Phoenicians. It would be dedicated to the deities Astarte and Adonis, and sometimes performed as a festival or social rite in the cities of Byblos, Afqa and Baalbek (later named Heliopolis) as well as the nearby Syrian city of Palmyra.
At the Etruscan site of Pyrgi, a center of worship of the eastern goddess Astarte, archaeologists identified a temple consecrated to her and built with at least 17 small rooms that may have served as quarters for temple prostitutes.Biblical Archaeology Society Staff, Sacred Prostitution in the Story of Judah and Tamar? , 7 August 2018 Similarly, a temple dedicated to her equated goddess Atargatis in Dura-Europos, was found with nearly a dozen small rooms with low benches, which might have used either for sacred meals or sacred services of women jailed in the temple for adultery. Pyrgi's sacred prostitutes were famous enough to be apparently mentioned in a lost fragment of Lucilius's works.Ana María Jiménez Flores, Cultos fenicio-púnicos de Gádir: Prostitución sagrada y Puella Gaditanae, 2001. Habis 32. Universidad de Sevilla.
In northern Africa, the area of influence of the Phoenician colony of Carthage, this service was associated to the city of Sicca, a nearby city that received the name of Sicca Veneria for its temple of Astarte or Tanit (called Venus by Roman authors). Valerius Maximus describes how their women gained gifts by engaging in prostitution with visitors.Valerius Maximus, Factorum et dictorum memorabilium libri novem, II. 6.15
Phoenicio-Punic settlements in Hispania, like Cancho Roano, Gadir, Castulo and La Quéjola, have suggested this practice through their archaeology and iconography. In particular, Cancho Roano features a sanctuary built with multiple cells or rooms, which has been identified as a possible place of sacred prostitution in honor to Astarte.Teresa Moneo, Religio iberica: santuarios, ritos y divinidades (siglos VII-I A.C.), 2003, Real Academia de la Historia, A similar institution might have been found in Gadir. Its posterior, renowned erotic dancers called puellae gaditanae in Roman sources (or cinaedi in the case of male dancers) might have been desecrated heirs of this practice, considering the role occupied by sex and dance on Phoenician culture.José María Blázquez Martínez, La diosa de Chipre, Real Academia de la Historia. Saitabi. Revista de la Facultat de Geografia i Història, 62-63 (2012-2013), pp. 39-50Guadalupe López Monteagudo, María Pilar San Nicolás Pedraz, Astarté-Europa en la península ibérica - Un ejemplo de interpretatio romana, Complurum Extra, 6(I), 1996: 451-470
Another center of cult to Astarte was Cyprus, whose main temples were located in Paphos, Amathus and Kition. The epigraphy of the Kition temple describes personal economic activity on the temple, as sacred prostitution would have been taxed as any other occupation, and names possible practitioners as grm (male) and lmt (female).Julio González Alcalde, Simbología de la diosa Tanit en representaciones cerámicas ibéricas, Quad. Preh. Arq. Cast. 18, 1997
Ancient Israel The Hebrew Bible uses two different words for prostitute, zonah ()Associated with the corresponding verb zanah. incorporating Strong's concordance (1890) and Gesenius's Lexicon (1857) and qedesha ( qəḏēšā). Zonah meant an ordinary prostitute or "loose woman'". Qedeshah literally means "set apart" (in feminine form), from the triliteral Q-D-Š, meaning "holy, consecrated, set apart". Zonah and qedeshah are not interchangeable terms: the former occurs 93 times in the Bible, whereas the latter is only used in five places, incorporating Strong's concordance (1890) and Gesenius's Lexicon (1857). conveying different connotations.
This double meaning has led to the belief that qedeshot (the plural of qedesha) were not ordinary prostitutes, but sacred ones who worked out of fertility temples. However, the lack of solid evidence has indicated that the word might refer to prostitutes who offered their services in the vicinity of temples, where they could attract a larger number of clients. The term might have originated as consecrated maidens employed in Canaanite and Phoenician temples, which became synonymous with harlotry for Biblical writers.
In any case, the translation of sacred prostitute has continued, however, because it explains how the word can mean such disparate concepts as "sacred" and "prostitute". As put by DeGrado, "neither the interpretation of the as a 'priestess-not-prostitute' (according to Westenholz) nor as a 'prostitute-not-priestess' (according to Gruber) adequately represents the semantic range of Hebrew word in biblical and post-biblical Hebrew."