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The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity
In this study, Stephanie Budin demonstrates that sacred prostitution, the sale of a person’s body for sex in which some or all of the money earned was devoted to a deity or a temple, did not exist in the ancient world. Reconsidering the evidence from the ancient Near East, the Greco-Roman texts, and the Early Christian authors, Budin shows that the majority of sources that have traditionally been understood as pertaining to sacred prostitution actually have nothing to do with this institution. The few texts that are usually invoked on this subject are, moreover, terribly misunderstood. Furthermore, contrary to many current hypotheses, the creation of the myth of sacred prostitution has nothing to do with notions of accusation or the construction of a decadent, Oriental “Other.” Instead, the myth has come into being as a result of more than 2,000 years of misinterpretations, false assumptions, and faulty methodology. The study of sacred prostitution is, effectively, a historiographical reckoning.
384 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2007
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November 29, 2020The purpose of Stephanie L. Budin’s monograph is easy enough to ascertain from the title. She endeavors to explain why the practice of sacred prostitution is a myth, a fallacy perpetuated by thousands of years of mistaken translations and interpretations by scholars and ancient writers. To Budin, sacred prostitution is nothing but “a sketch of an artificial conglomeration of ideas that have been pulled together over the centuries into the image of a ritual or institution or practice.” This publication is an attempt to settle the debated existence of sacred prostitution once and for all.
Budin attempts to make this point by analyzing evidence from a variety of ancient societies, including ancient Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome. In Chapter 1, she introduces the reader to the topic of her book and states how she will prove her thesis through contextualization, literary analysis, and negative evidence. Budin provides an exhaustive list of definitions for the term ‘sacred prostituiton,’ citing a plethora of dictionaries and scholars before providing her own definition, (“sacred prostitution is the sale of a person’s body for sexual purposes where some or all portions of the money/goods received for the transaction belongs to a deity”), from which she will base her many conclusions. She then primes the reader for the remainder of her book, providing a brief list of why sacred prostitution never existed in the first place: the institution was a literary construct, the lack of a direct native term for ‘sacred prostitute’ in ancient texts, and the influence of confirmation bias amongst scholars and ancient writers alike.
Chapter 2 discusses evidence from the Near East, the supposed birthplace of sacred prostitution, by investigating the vocabulary utilized in the ancient languages of Akkadian, Sumerian, and Caanaanite. She demonstrates how terms typically associated with sacred prostitution do not, in fact, relate to prostitutes at all. Chapter 3 provides “a collection of the most commonly cited references to sacred prostitution in the Greco-Roman reportoire,” while Chapters 4 through 9 analyze the aforementioned primary sources that contributed to the rise of the myth of sacred prostitution. Chapter 4 is a crucial chapter to Budin’s book, as she frequently refers back to its contents throughout her book. In this section, she pinpoints Herodotus as the ‘father’ and primary perpetrator of sacred prostitution, as his description of Babylonian women in Histories 1.199 has “directly or indirectly” influenced other ancient writers like Strabo in perpetuating sacred prostitution. These Herodotean influences can be observed in Chapters 5, 6, and 7, as Budin deconstructs Lucian’s De Dea Syria, Pindar’s Fragment 122, and Strabo’s multiple depictions of sacred prostituion in Babylonia and Corinth. Chapter 8 moves slightly away from the Herodotean influence, and focuses on the works produced by Roman authors Klearkhos, Justinus, and Valerius Maximus. In this chapter, Budin argues that evidence for sacred prostitutes has been found by “reading into the texts” and transforming depictions of revenge and rape into proof of sacred prostitution.
While most of Budin’s book is based upon textual evidence, she offers the reader a brief overview of the archaeological evidence from ancient Etruria in Chapter 9 to further explain the “gratuitous circular reasoning” scholars use when literary evidence is lacking. Chapter 10 discusses the rhetoric of early Christian authors, stating that sacred prostitution was a fictitious creation in order to accuse their opponents of egregiously lustful behaviors.” Budin concludes her book in Chapter 11 by providing the reader with the historiography of sacred prostitution, demonstrating how Classicists dating as far back to the Victorian Era have errenously sustained the myth. In each chapter, Budin comes to the conclusion that ancient societies may have experienced prostitution or sacred religious rituals, but never concurrently. By the end of the book, the reader is left with an image of sacred prostitution that recalls a terrible game of whisper down the lane, where the final ‘message’ of sacred prostitution had been so radically altered as a result of eons of bad analysis and unattentive reading.
There are many accomplishments worthy of note in Budin’s monograph. One of them, as noted by Will Deming, is the fact that Budin’s work is the first attempt to comprehensively “debunk” sacred prostitution as an ancient practice. Along similar lines, Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer notes the novelty of Budin’s research as the monograph breaks away from traditional studies of sacred prostitution that centered on Mesopotamia exclusively. Thus, her initiative to begin holistic review of sacred prostitution and its proponents is one to be lauded. Also of novelty was Budin’s humor, which complemented her firm determination to convey the foolishness of sacred prostitution: “The myth of sacred prostitution probably dates back to the fifth century BCE, when some fellow went home to tell his family what he heard from Herodotus today (“You won’t believe what they do in Babylon…!”).” In addition to her humor, Budin’s consideration to detail, particularly to vocabulary and grammatical structure, as one of the greatest strengths of this monograph. In Chapter 7, she devotes twelve of fifty-seven pages to exploring the three various definitions of the word hierodule (translated as ‘sacred slave’) in ancient Egyptian and Anatolian contexts. Her careful analysis of terms historically associated with sacred prostitution makes it apparent that terms were taken out of context and misused by ancient writers and modern scholars alike, moving the actual existence of sacred prostitution into a very dubious category.
For all of Budin’s successes, there are a few shortcomings within her book. I will first begin with its composition. While the book contains a Dedication, Acknowledgements, Abbreviations, an Index, and Bibliography, there is no Appendix where the reader could obtain additional information on the author’s sources. I suspect that Budin’s target audience for this publication is well-knowledged classicists familiar with the idea of sacred prostitution and its main ancient advocates, not undergraduate students just becoming acquainted with the term. If trained scholars are indeed her primary audience, that would perhaps explain the lack of an Appendix. As an undergraduate student, however, I would have appreciated an Appendix where Budin could have provided the following information: a brief biography of each ancient writer that she included in her monograph; the limitations of each aforementioned author’s works; and a series of maps depicting each geographical location that she discusses (Babylonia, Etruria, Corinth, Armenia, Pontic Comana, Egyptian Thebes, etc.). While Budin does discuss a few of the limitations of some ancient writers in the very chapters themselves— for instance, Budin devotes six pages of Chapter 4 to discussing Herodotus’ role as a Greek historiographer and often reminds the reader in Chapter 7 that Strabo was a Corinthian writer and thus providing an outside perspective on Babylonia— I believe that this discussion would have been better suited in an Appendix so that Budin could present the issues of evidence more concretely.
Second, there is the issue of Budin’s own definition of sacred prostitution. Though Budin provides a definition of her own “for the sake of clarity,” I doubt that many other contemporary scholars would automatically default to the definition that she coined— especially if this definition was used to bolster her own argument. Deming points out that Budin’s definition is narrow and is therefore able to exclude texts that do not specifically mention payment, including instances where “temple personnel, if they offered patrons sex, may have received support from the temple for this.” Many scholars like Deming, who likely have their own specific definition of sacred prostitution and what practices may fall beneath it, would be correct to question Budin’s definition as it almost guarantees that there will be little evidence in antiquity to support sacred prostitution. Perhaps if Budin selected a definition that was more commonly used or agreed upon by a majority of Classicists, this issue of Budin’s definition versus that of all other scholars and critics may have been averted. Discussion of how sacred prostitution has typically been defined by Classicists and how she arrived at her own definition of sacred prostitution for the purposes of her book would have been appropriate in an Appendix, had she decided to include one.
All things considered, Budin’s monograph is a large step forward in the study of sacred prostitution in antiquity. As sacred prostitution has been a long-debated topic within ancient studies, it is refreshing to see an analysis that compels readers to reimagine sacred prostitution, revisit the facts, and challenge previously-held conceptions. Much of her evidence and analysis of ancient writers does strongly suggest that mistakes were made by ancient writers and Classicists alike. I belief that if any issue is taken with her piece, it will be from scholars who question the accuracy of her claim that modern-day scholars are as much to blame for the perpetuation of sacred prostitution as Herodotus or Strabo. Rather than take offense to this claim, scholars should take this statement as an invitation to conduct further research of their own in rebuttal. Whether or not her conclusions are ones that scholars can concur upon, Budin’s piece is one that will remain with scholars for quite some time.
Budin attempts to make this point by analyzing evidence from a variety of ancient societies, including ancient Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome. In Chapter 1, she introduces the reader to the topic of her book and states how she will prove her thesis through contextualization, literary analysis, and negative evidence. Budin provides an exhaustive list of definitions for the term ‘sacred prostituiton,’ citing a plethora of dictionaries and scholars before providing her own definition, (“sacred prostitution is the sale of a person’s body for sexual purposes where some or all portions of the money/goods received for the transaction belongs to a deity”), from which she will base her many conclusions. She then primes the reader for the remainder of her book, providing a brief list of why sacred prostitution never existed in the first place: the institution was a literary construct, the lack of a direct native term for ‘sacred prostitute’ in ancient texts, and the influence of confirmation bias amongst scholars and ancient writers alike.
Chapter 2 discusses evidence from the Near East, the supposed birthplace of sacred prostitution, by investigating the vocabulary utilized in the ancient languages of Akkadian, Sumerian, and Caanaanite. She demonstrates how terms typically associated with sacred prostitution do not, in fact, relate to prostitutes at all. Chapter 3 provides “a collection of the most commonly cited references to sacred prostitution in the Greco-Roman reportoire,” while Chapters 4 through 9 analyze the aforementioned primary sources that contributed to the rise of the myth of sacred prostitution. Chapter 4 is a crucial chapter to Budin’s book, as she frequently refers back to its contents throughout her book. In this section, she pinpoints Herodotus as the ‘father’ and primary perpetrator of sacred prostitution, as his description of Babylonian women in Histories 1.199 has “directly or indirectly” influenced other ancient writers like Strabo in perpetuating sacred prostitution. These Herodotean influences can be observed in Chapters 5, 6, and 7, as Budin deconstructs Lucian’s De Dea Syria, Pindar’s Fragment 122, and Strabo’s multiple depictions of sacred prostituion in Babylonia and Corinth. Chapter 8 moves slightly away from the Herodotean influence, and focuses on the works produced by Roman authors Klearkhos, Justinus, and Valerius Maximus. In this chapter, Budin argues that evidence for sacred prostitutes has been found by “reading into the texts” and transforming depictions of revenge and rape into proof of sacred prostitution.
While most of Budin’s book is based upon textual evidence, she offers the reader a brief overview of the archaeological evidence from ancient Etruria in Chapter 9 to further explain the “gratuitous circular reasoning” scholars use when literary evidence is lacking. Chapter 10 discusses the rhetoric of early Christian authors, stating that sacred prostitution was a fictitious creation in order to accuse their opponents of egregiously lustful behaviors.” Budin concludes her book in Chapter 11 by providing the reader with the historiography of sacred prostitution, demonstrating how Classicists dating as far back to the Victorian Era have errenously sustained the myth. In each chapter, Budin comes to the conclusion that ancient societies may have experienced prostitution or sacred religious rituals, but never concurrently. By the end of the book, the reader is left with an image of sacred prostitution that recalls a terrible game of whisper down the lane, where the final ‘message’ of sacred prostitution had been so radically altered as a result of eons of bad analysis and unattentive reading.
There are many accomplishments worthy of note in Budin’s monograph. One of them, as noted by Will Deming, is the fact that Budin’s work is the first attempt to comprehensively “debunk” sacred prostitution as an ancient practice. Along similar lines, Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer notes the novelty of Budin’s research as the monograph breaks away from traditional studies of sacred prostitution that centered on Mesopotamia exclusively. Thus, her initiative to begin holistic review of sacred prostitution and its proponents is one to be lauded. Also of novelty was Budin’s humor, which complemented her firm determination to convey the foolishness of sacred prostitution: “The myth of sacred prostitution probably dates back to the fifth century BCE, when some fellow went home to tell his family what he heard from Herodotus today (“You won’t believe what they do in Babylon…!”).” In addition to her humor, Budin’s consideration to detail, particularly to vocabulary and grammatical structure, as one of the greatest strengths of this monograph. In Chapter 7, she devotes twelve of fifty-seven pages to exploring the three various definitions of the word hierodule (translated as ‘sacred slave’) in ancient Egyptian and Anatolian contexts. Her careful analysis of terms historically associated with sacred prostitution makes it apparent that terms were taken out of context and misused by ancient writers and modern scholars alike, moving the actual existence of sacred prostitution into a very dubious category.
For all of Budin’s successes, there are a few shortcomings within her book. I will first begin with its composition. While the book contains a Dedication, Acknowledgements, Abbreviations, an Index, and Bibliography, there is no Appendix where the reader could obtain additional information on the author’s sources. I suspect that Budin’s target audience for this publication is well-knowledged classicists familiar with the idea of sacred prostitution and its main ancient advocates, not undergraduate students just becoming acquainted with the term. If trained scholars are indeed her primary audience, that would perhaps explain the lack of an Appendix. As an undergraduate student, however, I would have appreciated an Appendix where Budin could have provided the following information: a brief biography of each ancient writer that she included in her monograph; the limitations of each aforementioned author’s works; and a series of maps depicting each geographical location that she discusses (Babylonia, Etruria, Corinth, Armenia, Pontic Comana, Egyptian Thebes, etc.). While Budin does discuss a few of the limitations of some ancient writers in the very chapters themselves— for instance, Budin devotes six pages of Chapter 4 to discussing Herodotus’ role as a Greek historiographer and often reminds the reader in Chapter 7 that Strabo was a Corinthian writer and thus providing an outside perspective on Babylonia— I believe that this discussion would have been better suited in an Appendix so that Budin could present the issues of evidence more concretely.
Second, there is the issue of Budin’s own definition of sacred prostitution. Though Budin provides a definition of her own “for the sake of clarity,” I doubt that many other contemporary scholars would automatically default to the definition that she coined— especially if this definition was used to bolster her own argument. Deming points out that Budin’s definition is narrow and is therefore able to exclude texts that do not specifically mention payment, including instances where “temple personnel, if they offered patrons sex, may have received support from the temple for this.” Many scholars like Deming, who likely have their own specific definition of sacred prostitution and what practices may fall beneath it, would be correct to question Budin’s definition as it almost guarantees that there will be little evidence in antiquity to support sacred prostitution. Perhaps if Budin selected a definition that was more commonly used or agreed upon by a majority of Classicists, this issue of Budin’s definition versus that of all other scholars and critics may have been averted. Discussion of how sacred prostitution has typically been defined by Classicists and how she arrived at her own definition of sacred prostitution for the purposes of her book would have been appropriate in an Appendix, had she decided to include one.
All things considered, Budin’s monograph is a large step forward in the study of sacred prostitution in antiquity. As sacred prostitution has been a long-debated topic within ancient studies, it is refreshing to see an analysis that compels readers to reimagine sacred prostitution, revisit the facts, and challenge previously-held conceptions. Much of her evidence and analysis of ancient writers does strongly suggest that mistakes were made by ancient writers and Classicists alike. I belief that if any issue is taken with her piece, it will be from scholars who question the accuracy of her claim that modern-day scholars are as much to blame for the perpetuation of sacred prostitution as Herodotus or Strabo. Rather than take offense to this claim, scholars should take this statement as an invitation to conduct further research of their own in rebuttal. Whether or not her conclusions are ones that scholars can concur upon, Budin’s piece is one that will remain with scholars for quite some time.
May 22, 2022
Full review to come.
"Further reading" recommendations at the bottom.
The book accomplishes what it sets out to do quite well despite its shortcomings. It's written in an engaging style with little jargon, and the author also keeps the post-modernist and gender woo-woo to a minimum.
The author shows that very few of the sources (most of them are historiographical) that we think refer to sacred prostitution actually refer to it at all. Some refer to sex (not prostitution) with no reference to religion, some refer to religion but not sex (let alone prostitution), some refer to a combination of sex and religion, some refer to prostitution with no mention of religion, and some refer to sexual violence with no allusions to religion.
A lot of these sources are actually referring to undesirable behavior (by the standards/opinion of the source's author) that has little to do with sex and that the ancient author calls "fornication" or similar terminology (hyperbolic dysphemism). One of my favorite examples is Strabo describing how ancient unmarried upper-class Armenians dated each other and exchanged gifts (he calls this "prostitution" or "fornication").
The best sections of the book are the ones that trace the history of the myth and its development up to the present day, and the ones that contrast how Jungians, neo-Pagans, and their ilk have interpreted this fictional institution with how the ancient writers described it.
I was also impressed by the author's good grasp of Classical Greek.
Further reading...
-"The Vanishing Hebrew Harlot" by Irene E. Riegner. This book shows that the ancient term zonah almost never referred to a prostitute. It was almost always used as an insult (again, in hyperbolic dysphemism fashion) to attack things/people the speaker disliked (usually certain religious practices).
-"The kar.kid/harimtu, Prostitute or Single Woman? A Reconsideration of the Evidence" by Julia Assante. It proves that the kar-kid and (especially) harimtu that show up in ancient Near Eastern texts are a special/unique (it has no modern equivalent) and distinct socio-legal category of women, but they aren't prostitutes. The article also sheds light on the position of women in Babylonian and Assyrian society.
"Further reading" recommendations at the bottom.
The book accomplishes what it sets out to do quite well despite its shortcomings. It's written in an engaging style with little jargon, and the author also keeps the post-modernist and gender woo-woo to a minimum.
The author shows that very few of the sources (most of them are historiographical) that we think refer to sacred prostitution actually refer to it at all. Some refer to sex (not prostitution) with no reference to religion, some refer to religion but not sex (let alone prostitution), some refer to a combination of sex and religion, some refer to prostitution with no mention of religion, and some refer to sexual violence with no allusions to religion.
A lot of these sources are actually referring to undesirable behavior (by the standards/opinion of the source's author) that has little to do with sex and that the ancient author calls "fornication" or similar terminology (hyperbolic dysphemism). One of my favorite examples is Strabo describing how ancient unmarried upper-class Armenians dated each other and exchanged gifts (he calls this "prostitution" or "fornication").
The best sections of the book are the ones that trace the history of the myth and its development up to the present day, and the ones that contrast how Jungians, neo-Pagans, and their ilk have interpreted this fictional institution with how the ancient writers described it.
I was also impressed by the author's good grasp of Classical Greek.
Further reading...
-"The Vanishing Hebrew Harlot" by Irene E. Riegner. This book shows that the ancient term zonah almost never referred to a prostitute. It was almost always used as an insult (again, in hyperbolic dysphemism fashion) to attack things/people the speaker disliked (usually certain religious practices).
-"The kar.kid/harimtu, Prostitute or Single Woman? A Reconsideration of the Evidence" by Julia Assante. It proves that the kar-kid and (especially) harimtu that show up in ancient Near Eastern texts are a special/unique (it has no modern equivalent) and distinct socio-legal category of women, but they aren't prostitutes. The article also sheds light on the position of women in Babylonian and Assyrian society.
April 23, 2024
An extremely clearly written absolute tour-de-force in scholarship by Budin, who very cleanly goes through the "evidence" for "sacred prostitution" and shows how much of this modern myth which fills so many tomes worth of New Age, Neo-Pagan and Jungian nonsense came overwhelmingly out of misunderstandings, misreadings and specially mistranslations - it is outrageous to me, as a translations person, to see how uncritically and blithely "hierodule" (literally "sacred slave") was translated into "sacred prostitute", not to mention the even more flagrant examples with Semitic cultic personnel. If you don't know what it is, translate it as "sacred prostitute"! Even if they're not only not prostitutes, but meant to be chaste, like fucking nuns (kinda, not really - it's more about not reproducing). Likewise, if someone is an eunuch, is a crossdresser, they NECESSARILY must be "sodomites" and "homosexual cultic prostitutes". Even today - you can look it up right now - if you look up in the Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary, the pilipili is listed as "homosexual lover" and "transvestite" with the Akkadian form «assinnu "(male cultic prostitute)"; parrû "(homosexual) lover"». Very curious that the assinnu, an effeminate gender-non-conforming man, very possibly an eunuch, is somehow the Akkadian form of the pilipili which are explicitly WOMEN, turned into men by Inanna, female-sexed crossdressing cultic performers of some sort, AFAB rather than the usual male crossdressers associated with Inanna, the references to which are very intriguing and enigmatic (they have their pronouns changed from female to male, per example, and in the same work referred to as the "changed" pilipili, unlike the eunuchs and crossdressers, which is certainly interesting and begs the question of whether these were considered men socially or by "the people of Ishtar" or not). Although we know very little about it, just about the only thing we know is that they were born as women and thus most certainly not "effeminates" or "eunuchs". This one doesn't even come up in the book, it's just one I've seen myself because of how prevalent this myth is.
Budin writes extremely clearly, and with an only occasional type of very dry, welcome humor. It is never obnoxiously "snarky" and always takes its targets seriously: as she herself writes, it is this self-seriousness in part which allows academic myths to proliferate. A dig to Herodotus is always welcomed where appropriate. She is, I think, remarkably respectful, I would say maybe too much at times because the obvious element that this myth exists because Victorian perverts wanted it to exist but also wanted, in true repressed uppity bourgeois fashion, to feel above it and thus to disavow it, so it always happens "over there", and this is still why random archeological finds are tied to cultic prostitution almost immediately, as explored in the chapter on Etruria. To me it's very obvious that this exists as an erotic fantasy from repressed people who see it everywhere, even in random law plaques that deal with Jupiter and Ceres that don't even mention sex or anything like that. She is very respectful of this and just explains how little the concept has changed since even the 18th century, and does indeed not mock how much of this "evidence" boils down to "Source: Sex Fantasy".
That said, Miss Budin strikes me as having, at times, overstated her point, though it is an excellent point and excellently argued: an example is this notion that Phoenician Ashtart is not a sex goddess. I actually am a huge fan of how she brings up the fact that "Aphrodite" could be all sorts of very different goddesses and that interpretatio greca often made the same deity to be different Greek ones depending on the person and place (an example of mine is Atargatis, who was called alternatively Hera or Aphrodite), but then it's as if she fails to account for her own remark when she discusses why the Etruscans equated Ashtart with Uni, their Juno/Hera:
This does not actually hurt her argument at all ultimately, but this is an outstandingly silly argument: Ashtart of the Phoenicians isn't a sex goddess? All her cognates are, but not her? On what basis, exactly, because the epigraphy doesn't point to it? Quite frankly, what does that matter, compared to the texts of her cognates that we do have? It is in cuneiform tablets that we see myths of Inanna/Ishtar/(Ugaritic) Ashtart/etc, that we see love magic spells written out, and so on. That it has "erotic" iconography should be enough to tell, considering that the reason we don't have more is simply because the Phoenician texts haven't survived! We even have entirely cognate myths (i.e. Ashtart and Eshdun), what is this weird cope argument from a negative?
Not only that, but... that means nothing? What does her being "a queenly goddess, a protector of the royal family (at least in Tyre), and a warrior goddess" have to do with her being a sex goddess or not? Literally all of that is also true of Inanna/Ishtar! And it ought to be, in the Bronze Age the king was responsible for fertility, warfare and law and so it is a simple development that the king must be married (that is why she is a goddess and not a god, yes, sorry to burst bubbles) with the goddess of all those things, hence Inanna/Ishtar. Very similar but non-cognate goddesses are seen with Hathor-Sekhmet in Egypt, who even had a sacred marriage with Horus and everything, Freyja in Germanic religion, and for an even more out of the way and rough equivalency, Jiutian Xuannü in China. Athena herself has many elements of Inanna and the Canaanite Anat, although much of her iconography must be of Indo-Euro origin (the shield-maiden aspect, specifically, emphasized to a great degree in Mycenaean iconography due to the enormous figure-of-8 shield in the arts), and herself likely comes less from the Hurro-Hittite Ishtar Shaushka (though her birth myth most certainly does) than she would from the pre-IE, Hattic Sun Goddess of Arinna, yet the very specific ties with urbanism, the defense of the city and its people, the personal defense of king and hero as happens in the Homeric epics, etc, are all traits that smack unmistakably of Inanna, even hyper-specific things like turning the king more handsome (a fixture of hymns to Sumerian kings, and a thing she repeatedly does to Odysseus in the Odyssey) have long since made people compare the Greek hard-virgin and the Sumerian sex goddess.
I've gone on long enough is the fact that all of those traits of "Phoenician" Ashtart are not only contradictory to her being a sex goddess, but are in fact extremely common, universal even, some would say, for sex goddesses. Aphrodite herself is a "queenly" and "warrior goddess" at Sparta, where she was literally called "Aphrodite Hera" and "Aphrodite Areia", and paired alongside Athena in their armed cultic statues (amusingly accidentally recreating the Anat/Ashtart duo from Ugarit). That this oversight can only come from a wish to overstate the point is, in my eyes, quite clear.
Another way that the point is overstated, although this is arguable and may be semantics - though certainly not in how scholars used to and still talk about it lol - is that although I don't disagree with Budin's characterization of all the Sumero-Semitic cultic personnel as not prostitutes, the strict definition given to prostitution seriously takes away of what, are the duties of a priestess who is not a prostitute, but whose duties include specific cultic sex roles? These are much rarer than all the literature quoted and often repeated would have you believe mind you, but it was still presumably "a thing", and there is a discussion to be had on it, although I agree that the name and specter of "sacred prostitution" needs to disappear for good.
Beyond that, I would've liked to have seen other traditions tied with this debate addressed: the "sacred prostitution" thing is so utterly tied with extremely racist, Orientalist notions that are contrasted with the moral righteousness of the Greeks and Romans (no wonder these people were and are so reticent to admit that Greek myth took so much from the East, good lord!) that, if the little they have counts as "prostitution", then so would, say, the sexual intercourse between Iasion of Crete and Demeter, which is obviously a sacred marriage thing of sorts, and if not, then certainly comes out of old rituals of copulation of agrarian fertility, on the "thrice-plowed fields". Aphrodite we can all pin on Le Orient, but few would have the balls to deny that the tale of Iasion doesn't fit their own criteria and tying the motherly grain-goddess par-excellence to "lascivious Asiatic goddesses"!
Overall, besides some nitpicks regarding the misunderstanding over why a war goddess was most often also a sex goddess, and the lack of going into the sexual cultic role of some of these priestesses, or in the mythology, this is an absolutely essential read on the topic, clean, laconic yet exhaustively detailed, going over every piece of "evidence" from various disciplines.
Budin writes extremely clearly, and with an only occasional type of very dry, welcome humor. It is never obnoxiously "snarky" and always takes its targets seriously: as she herself writes, it is this self-seriousness in part which allows academic myths to proliferate. A dig to Herodotus is always welcomed where appropriate. She is, I think, remarkably respectful, I would say maybe too much at times because the obvious element that this myth exists because Victorian perverts wanted it to exist but also wanted, in true repressed uppity bourgeois fashion, to feel above it and thus to disavow it, so it always happens "over there", and this is still why random archeological finds are tied to cultic prostitution almost immediately, as explored in the chapter on Etruria. To me it's very obvious that this exists as an erotic fantasy from repressed people who see it everywhere, even in random law plaques that deal with Jupiter and Ceres that don't even mention sex or anything like that. She is very respectful of this and just explains how little the concept has changed since even the 18th century, and does indeed not mock how much of this "evidence" boils down to "Source: Sex Fantasy".
That said, Miss Budin strikes me as having, at times, overstated her point, though it is an excellent point and excellently argued: an example is this notion that Phoenician Ashtart is not a sex goddess. I actually am a huge fan of how she brings up the fact that "Aphrodite" could be all sorts of very different goddesses and that interpretatio greca often made the same deity to be different Greek ones depending on the person and place (an example of mine is Atargatis, who was called alternatively Hera or Aphrodite), but then it's as if she fails to account for her own remark when she discusses why the Etruscans equated Ashtart with Uni, their Juno/Hera:
But Ashtart is not a love goddess. Although her iconography does have erotic elements, what we know of the goddess based on the epigraphic evidence of her cult in the Levant, Cyprus, and abroad all suggests that Ashtart, like Uni, is a queenly goddess, a protector of the royal family (at least in Tyre), and a warrior goddess. The only reason this Levantine deity is associated with love (as well as sex and fertility) is because of the syncretism that exists between Phoenician Ashtart and Greek Aphrodite.
This does not actually hurt her argument at all ultimately, but this is an outstandingly silly argument: Ashtart of the Phoenicians isn't a sex goddess? All her cognates are, but not her? On what basis, exactly, because the epigraphy doesn't point to it? Quite frankly, what does that matter, compared to the texts of her cognates that we do have? It is in cuneiform tablets that we see myths of Inanna/Ishtar/(Ugaritic) Ashtart/etc, that we see love magic spells written out, and so on. That it has "erotic" iconography should be enough to tell, considering that the reason we don't have more is simply because the Phoenician texts haven't survived! We even have entirely cognate myths (i.e. Ashtart and Eshdun), what is this weird cope argument from a negative?
Not only that, but... that means nothing? What does her being "a queenly goddess, a protector of the royal family (at least in Tyre), and a warrior goddess" have to do with her being a sex goddess or not? Literally all of that is also true of Inanna/Ishtar! And it ought to be, in the Bronze Age the king was responsible for fertility, warfare and law and so it is a simple development that the king must be married (that is why she is a goddess and not a god, yes, sorry to burst bubbles) with the goddess of all those things, hence Inanna/Ishtar. Very similar but non-cognate goddesses are seen with Hathor-Sekhmet in Egypt, who even had a sacred marriage with Horus and everything, Freyja in Germanic religion, and for an even more out of the way and rough equivalency, Jiutian Xuannü in China. Athena herself has many elements of Inanna and the Canaanite Anat, although much of her iconography must be of Indo-Euro origin (the shield-maiden aspect, specifically, emphasized to a great degree in Mycenaean iconography due to the enormous figure-of-8 shield in the arts), and herself likely comes less from the Hurro-Hittite Ishtar Shaushka (though her birth myth most certainly does) than she would from the pre-IE, Hattic Sun Goddess of Arinna, yet the very specific ties with urbanism, the defense of the city and its people, the personal defense of king and hero as happens in the Homeric epics, etc, are all traits that smack unmistakably of Inanna, even hyper-specific things like turning the king more handsome (a fixture of hymns to Sumerian kings, and a thing she repeatedly does to Odysseus in the Odyssey) have long since made people compare the Greek hard-virgin and the Sumerian sex goddess.
I've gone on long enough is the fact that all of those traits of "Phoenician" Ashtart are not only contradictory to her being a sex goddess, but are in fact extremely common, universal even, some would say, for sex goddesses. Aphrodite herself is a "queenly" and "warrior goddess" at Sparta, where she was literally called "Aphrodite Hera" and "Aphrodite Areia", and paired alongside Athena in their armed cultic statues (amusingly accidentally recreating the Anat/Ashtart duo from Ugarit). That this oversight can only come from a wish to overstate the point is, in my eyes, quite clear.
Another way that the point is overstated, although this is arguable and may be semantics - though certainly not in how scholars used to and still talk about it lol - is that although I don't disagree with Budin's characterization of all the Sumero-Semitic cultic personnel as not prostitutes, the strict definition given to prostitution seriously takes away of what, are the duties of a priestess who is not a prostitute, but whose duties include specific cultic sex roles? These are much rarer than all the literature quoted and often repeated would have you believe mind you, but it was still presumably "a thing", and there is a discussion to be had on it, although I agree that the name and specter of "sacred prostitution" needs to disappear for good.
Beyond that, I would've liked to have seen other traditions tied with this debate addressed: the "sacred prostitution" thing is so utterly tied with extremely racist, Orientalist notions that are contrasted with the moral righteousness of the Greeks and Romans (no wonder these people were and are so reticent to admit that Greek myth took so much from the East, good lord!) that, if the little they have counts as "prostitution", then so would, say, the sexual intercourse between Iasion of Crete and Demeter, which is obviously a sacred marriage thing of sorts, and if not, then certainly comes out of old rituals of copulation of agrarian fertility, on the "thrice-plowed fields". Aphrodite we can all pin on Le Orient, but few would have the balls to deny that the tale of Iasion doesn't fit their own criteria and tying the motherly grain-goddess par-excellence to "lascivious Asiatic goddesses"!
Overall, besides some nitpicks regarding the misunderstanding over why a war goddess was most often also a sex goddess, and the lack of going into the sexual cultic role of some of these priestesses, or in the mythology, this is an absolutely essential read on the topic, clean, laconic yet exhaustively detailed, going over every piece of "evidence" from various disciplines.
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January 23, 2015WHORES WHORES WHORES
November 9, 2022
Unique in its own way
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