Ishtar, Diana, Astarte and Isis were all called Virgin too, but that didn’t mean ‘sexually chaste’ as Christianity has had us believe. Instead, it meant ‘sexually independent’. A woman unto herself. Basically, badass. Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor outline in their book The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth that virgins were literally ‘free women’. They were women who were ‘one in themselves’, i.e. not yet legally owned by their husbands. In fact, the very word ‘virgin’ derives from a Latin root meaning strength, force and skill.
