Premium Article Preview: In the modern world, the mere mention of “Sacred Prostitution” may receive raised eyebrows or disgusted grimaces, but academics are now questioning these erotic stories. Some researchers even dispute holy prostitution altogether, believing that it all began when a few ancient Greek writers concocted defamatory customs about foreigners as evidence of moral failures. Guest Author Martini Fisher uncovers the lives and truths behind the history of Sacred Prostitution.
I love this and the explanation of the ancient definition of the word virgin which was what originally referred to when speaking of virgin Goddesses.
The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity by Stephanie Lynn Budin covers this topic really well.
You have to take reports by ancient writers with a grain of salt because A) they were old men and sensationalising female sexuality was almost a hobby. And B) Greeks were highly xenophobic and the best way to discredit another society was to make up stories about sexual and religious perversion.
Did rituals like the hieros gamos exist in a religious sphere? Probably. Did temples own prostitutes as slaves, and use their income to maintain temples and sanctuaries? Also likely.
Did certain cults require women to prostitute themselves in the name of a goddess? Did sexual activity happen in temples? I doubt it.
Getting back to the linked article, the premise itself is not wrong. Sacred prostitution in Mesopotamia is now doubted by many scholars. However, the article (or what I can read of it, since I surprisingly don’t have a premium subscription to Ancient Origins) makes some glaring mistakes:
Ishtar was not called the Goddess Har. A couple of Google searches enabled me to trace the origin of this idea to The Sacred Prostitute: Eternal Aspect of the Feminine by Nancy Qualls-Corbett (1988, and you can feel it). Qualls-Corbett believes in the existence of sacred prostitutes, and her theories rest exactly on what modern academics are trying to disprove – the translation of Akkadian terms ḫarimtu, nadītu and qadištu as “prostitute”. She also perpetuates the idea that matriarchal societies (which Mesopotamia was NOT) were peaceful and in tune with nature. Lastly, she claims the Gilgamesh Epic was “completed about 7000 B.C.E., though possibly it comes from a much older oral tradition” (p. 33). What on Earth, Nancy? What on Earth?
Nancy’s source for Ishtar as the Goddess Har is Barbara Walker’s The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (1983), which I’m not going to delve into because it’s even worse and I don’t feel like debunking the theory that Greek hora, Arabic harem and English harlot have the same origin.
While we’re at it, the idea that “Ishtar was sometimes called the Goddess Har since she was the mother of the harlots” (quote from Ancient Origins) is preposterous, since it makes the assumption that the Akkadian-speaking Mesopotamians knew the English word “harlot”. In fact, the word “harlot” definitely has no links to Mesopotamia, and the simplest of Wiktionary searches will tell you that.
Next up: Spanish puta comes from the Latin word for “well”. Surprisingly, it doesn’t. There is a Latin word puteus meaning “pit” or “well”, but there is no etymological link. Go figure.
Puticuli, the Latin word for “grave-pits”, actuallymeans “the womb of rebirth”? Wow, I would’ve thought it came from puteus + the diminutive culus.
Don’t mind me, I’m just burying myself in the puticuli.
At this point, you can probably tell I’m pretty done with this article. In summary, the article was published on a non-academic website dedicated to fringe theories, uses outdated sources written by people from a different field, and presents some very shoddy etymologies as fact. Its core may reflect current research, but please, guys, there are far better sources out there. Try @bayoread‘s book recommendation of The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity. Try this academic article about sacred prostitutes in Greek and Roman times. Even this Tumblr post does a better job of explaining it than Ancient Origins.
I’ll conclude by linking my guide to online research and reminding you all to please check the content of what you’re sharing. Sharing without reading spreads misinformation – and this kind of misinformation is particularly harmful to Mesopotamian studies. I genuinely don’t care if people believe Ishtar was called the Goddess Har (though I will roll my eyes at it), but when people start believing aliens were responsible for Mesopotamian civilisation – thus discrediting the actual, Middle Eastern people behind it – and buying cuneiform tablets and cylinder seals on the black market so they can own something made by aliens, it becomes a serious problem. It’s much easier to check what you share and avoid supporting this kind of misinformation altogether.
I am not an expert on this topic, so I will say nothing about this specific subject matter. It does sound, however, like much of the crap that has been going around Western academia for hundreds of years now. It is a trend rooted in racism and a belief in the superiority of modern Western culture, that we refuse to simply take ancient writers at their word. They couldn’t possibly be describing actual events at the time, because we find that culture to be so immoral/alien to out modern sensibilities. They couldn’t possibly be telling the truth about the achievements of ancient people, because they were backward savages. This happens in modern anthropology as well. Yet, time and again, somebody looks at ancient texts that have been discounted as fairy tales, decides to go looking for the the archaeological evidence, and behold! it’s suddenly there. Western scholars at one time believed that the entire city of Troy was just a myth until they actually found it. In modern times, numerous anthropologists and botanists have asked the tribes of Peru how they learned to make ayahuasca, as it requires the combination of multiple unrelated plants. The shamans always answer, the spirits of the plants told them. But ‘nah, that can’t be it. There must be an explanation that fits in our worldview. Well ya know, maybe the spirits of the plants told them. And maybe we should put aside our perspective on these things and start taking ancient writers at their word.
