Sex before Stigma: Making Sense of the Absence of Stigmatization in the Spiritual Aspect of Sacred Prostitution in the Ethical Systems of the Ancient World

Abstract

Sex, when discussed in a public setting, turns out to be a controversial subject within the context of the hypersensitive inner workings of modern society. It often touches simultaneously upon both extremes of humanity’s rational disposition towards sex, namely sex being a matter of free choice on the one hand and being a cultural taboo on the other. One cannot freely talk about sex or practice sex in the public sphere in order for maintaining a sense of civic decency and public morality. This article attempts to look behind the notion of guilt associated with sex in the Judeo-Christian civilization of the West and rise above the prevailing pietistic cultural framework that came to dominate the globe after the conversion of the Byzantine Empire to Christianity. I will, therefore, treat sex as the enshrinement of the said concept in the sanctuary of human religious practice through history. Ritual sex is an artifact of the prehistoric times, which, within the fringes of pagan spirituality, wields an unprecedented influence on the religious life of historic times as well and thus needs to be investigated on a rather larger scale than the amount of scholarship typically dedicated to it to the end of understanding various strands of cultural and religious thought-processes involving sex among the ancient societies. This article will investigate the latter, for it is the ritual-sex-niche of the ancient culture that it is set to explore with maximum effort invested to keep a modern bias from entering the following pages. Besides, a point of focus in the article is the reconstruction of the phenomenology of the sacred and the spiritual articulated through the mystical expression of sexual communion, which will reverberate throughout the article. Keywords: temple prostitution, Greek, fertility cults, sacred sex, Orpheus, Dionysius, Artemis, Asherah, Aphrodite