“The original whore was a priestess, the conduit to the divine, the one through whose body one entered the sacred arena and was restored.”
Deena Metzger
In ancient religion, prostitution was sacralized. We find evidence of sacred prostitution in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Code of Hammurabi. Herodotus wrote, “Women of the land…sit in the temple of love and have intercourse with some stranger…. After their intercourse, she has made herself holy in the sight of the goddess.” The ritual practice of sacred sexual intercourse within the temples of Innana and Ishtar in Mesopotamia was understood to unleash divine fertile energy upon the land. The temple of Aphrodite in Corinth, according to the Greek historian Strabo, had over 1,000 prostitutes. Hesiod, a poet in the 8th century B.C.E., observed that the prostitutes’ sensual gifts “mellowed the behavior of men” by bringing sexual joy. Sexual intercourse with a temple prostitute was ritualized, the union of male and female in a fertility rite or the hieros gamos (ἱερὸς γάμος), the divine marriage between the god and the goddess. According to Julius Evola, “Ritual sex was the instrument for man’s participation in the sacram.” Sexual union was communion with the divine. Nancy Qualls-Corbert writes, “Desire and sexual response experienced as a regenerative power, were recognized as a gift or a blessing from the divine. Both a man’s and woman’s sexual nature together with their religious attitude were inseparable.” The sacred prostitute herself, according to Qualls-Corbet, was an image of the eternal feminine, “a woman, who, through ritual or psychological development, has come to know the spiritual side of her sexuality, her true Eroticism.” She consciously used sex as a means of enlightenment. The sacred prostitute was a sexual priestess who empowered men desirous of the “wondrous vulva” to connect with spiritual realities through pleasure. The French philosopher Georges Bataille noted, “The prostitutes in contact with sacred things, in surroundings themselves sacred, had a sacredness comparable with that of priests.” Prostitutes retain to some degree this consecration; they are votaries of sex. They are priestesses of the sacred sexual mysteries. “Erotic saint,” one writer suggests, is a term that should be applied to any “woman decent enough to service a man sexually.”
“Sex was brought openly and with reverence to the very altar of the goddess. In her temple, men and women came to find life and all that it had to offer in sensual pleasure and delight.”
Nancy Qualls-Corbett, The Sacred Prostitute: Eternal Aspect of the Feminine
Bataille also wrote, “Not every woman is a potential prostitute, but prostitution is the logical consequence of the feminine attitude.” Women, insofar as they make themselves objects of desire, are conditioned to provoke a male response. The prostitute merely adds a commercial aspect to the feminine disposition and embraces the objectification which other women more subtlety accept. “Prostitution made them into objects of masculine desire; objects which at any rate heralded the moment when in the close embrace nothing remained but only a convulsive continuity.” The prostitute is the protagonist in this drama. Feminist critic Camille Paglia writes, “The prostitute is not, as feminists claim, the victim of men, but rather their conqueror, an outlaw, who controls the sexual channels between nature and culture.”
“With prostitution, the prostitute was dedicated to a life of transgression,” Bataille continued. “The sacred or forbidden aspect of sexual activity remained apparent in her, for her whole life was dedicated to violating the taboo.” If the heart of eroticism is in transgression, as Bataille contends, prostitutes are priestesses of transgression. That is their vocation and allure.
Lutheran Guilt 