Sex and Religion. The Fall of Man. Diana Rose Hartmann

Siren XVlll (Artwork)

Sex and Religion. The Fall of Man. Diana Rose Hartmann

Can man be free if woman be a slave? Shelley

The stranger was viewed as an emissary of the gods, and when he tossed his coins into a woman's lap, he ritually said, "May the goddess Mylitta make thee happy." The money went to the woman but was an offering to the goddess in return for partaking in the rite, Qualls-Corbett says. Herodotus added, "After their intercourse she (the woman) has made herself holy in the sight of the goddess and goes away to her home; and thereafter there is no bribe however great that will get her." By the third century B.C., profane prostitution was clearly considered shameful.

It is interesting to consider the progression that took place after the Akkadians conquered Sumer, as a matrilineal culture that openly honored a sexual goddess with sexual rites was gradually transformed into a male-dominated culture where sex was more and more considered dangerous and/or shameful. This same transformation occurred in the three ancient civilizations that most directly influenced modern Western culture, namely Judea, Greece and Rome.

Why? The easiest answer is that as militaristic patriarchies established patrilineal descent, female promiscuity could no longer be permitted to threaten men's knowledge of paternity. For a man to be sure he was father of his children, the argument goes, he had to restrict access to his women. He had to make it bad and wrong for his women to have sex with anyone but himself. Any religion that encouraged female promiscuity had to be opposed.

This explanation is compelling in its simplicity and economic force, but it is not altogether psychologically satisfying. It explains political repression, but it does not explain the shame and fear so commonly attached to sex after the goddesses were discredited.

Joseph Campbell, in The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology, suggests a more subtle psychological and intellectual explanation when he writes "we are going to find, throughout the following history of the orthodox patriarchal systems of the West, that the power of this goddess-mother of the world overthrown by her sons, is to remain as an ever-present threat to their castle of reason." Perhaps it was the Oedipal feelings of the sons, combined with their left-brain orientation, that so turned them against their lascivious mothers.

Michel Foucault pointed out in The Use of Pleasure, however, that systems of sexual austerity in classical Greece were not really directed at women:

Women were generally subjected (excepting the liberty they could be granted by a status like that of courtesan) to extremely strict constraints, and yet this ethics was not addressed to women. It was an ethics for men: an ethics thought, written, and taught by men, and addressed to men -- to free men, obviously. A male ethics, consequently, in which women figured only as objects.

Foucault's observation suggests this ethics was not addressing men's mothers, or wives, but themselves, their own sexuality. The fascinating subtext in the development of Jewish, Greek and Roman attitudes towards sex is that without the guidance of female divinity, men were terrified of their own sexual obsessions. And it makes a certain sense. Don't we all know that Boys are only interested in One Thing? And once they get It, they don't want It any more?

From this perspective, the ecstatic self-castration practiced by priests of Cybele and Astarte in Roman times does not really fit the Freudian model of a castrating mother. It was not the goddess, after all, but the hermaphroditic monster Agdistis who inspired Attis to chop off his testicles, and his followers in their frenzies presumably took the same inspiration. Granted, sacrifice was often associated with the fertility rites of spring, but the idea of voluntarily sacrificing one's balls seems peculiarly male; it is men, not women, who feel such ecstatic ambivalence about them.

Moreover, precisely this kind of ascetic abnegation of sexuality characterized the male-dominated religious cultures of the time. Pliny, like the Pythagoreans before him, admired the virtues he ascribed to elephants: They were strictly monogamous and had sex only once every three years, and then only to beget children. Over and over, we find male ascetics in Judea, Greece and Rome teaching that sex for pleasure, and particularly masturbation, can weaken a man in ways reminiscent of but worse than actual emasculation.

Why so often in history do we find that female spirituality honors sex as sacred, while male spirituality finds it degrading, weakening, impure and sinful? Margaret Mead offers some clues in her remarkable study, Male and Female. For men, physical sexuality focuses on the moment of ejaculation, whereas a woman's physical sexuality is much more broadly integrated into her life, including menstruation, orgasm, intercourse, pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood. Through the normal course of their lives, women can automatically build a sense of sexual identity and achievement, even against the opposition of their culture, whereas ejaculation alone can never be enough for a man. Mead writes:

In every known human society, the male's need for achievement can be recognized.The recurrent problem of civilization is to define the male role satisfactorily enough; so that the male may in the course of his life reach a solid sense of irreversible achievement, of which his childhood knowledge of the satisfactions of childbearing have given him a glimpse.

There is another factor as well. Although both genders share many emotions surrounding sex, including love, tenderness, nurturing and the kind of testosterone-induced arousal pejoratively referred to as lust, men live with testosterone levels from 30 to over 100 times higher than those of women, on average. Trish Thomas in Issue 5 of Future Sex writes of a female-to-male transsexual named Max, who describes his emotional changes after taking male hormones:

I [now] understand why men are the animals that they are. You see sex in so many places that it's not necessarily meant to be. I see a pretty woman walking down the street and I can't keep my eyes off her. I don't even realize that I'm staring. Then I think to myself, "Well what's wrong with that, I just think she's good-looking."

Sex for men is like a buzzer that keeps going off whether or not you want it to, making it hard to integrate sex into the rest of life. Where sex is concerned, men, not women, are at the mercy of emotion they cannot control.

In Goddess-centric cultures, then, where women's sexuality was primary, it is not surprising sex was approached with confidence, nurturing and fertility proudly combined with pleasure. Conversely, as the Father-Warrior God became dominant, in Judea, Greece and Rome, it makes sense that the priests of the new order would try to quell such an insistent internal threat to the hero's self-discipline. Interestingly enough, though, in all three cultures, the explicitly male intellectual culture that emerged victorious continued to coexist with a "secret," perhaps no less powerful female culture that did not seek to declare dominance.

Consider the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, from which a great deal of our Western revulsion for harlotry derives. At the end of "The Hebrew God and His Female Complements" in The Feminist Companion to Mythology, Athalya Brenner writes:

Gender issues in the Hebrew Bible can hardly be redeemed for feminists. On the whole, the Good Book is a predominantly Male document which reflects a deeply-rooted conviction in regard to woman's Otherness and inferiority. The post-reading sensation I experience focuses on the bitter taste in my mouth. This is my heritage, I cannot shake it off. And it hurts.

As she observes, Jewish patriarchal religion was in intimate competition for more than 1000 years with the sex-positive Mother-Goddess religions of its near neighbors. In Exodus 34:12-16, the Father-God tells Moses:

Take heed to yourself, lest you make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land whither you go, lest it become a snare in the midst of you. You shall tear down their altars, and break their pillars, and cut down their Ashe'rim (for you shall worship no other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God), lest you make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land, and when they play the harlot after their gods and sacrifice to their gods and one invites you, you eat of his sacrifice, and you take of their daughters for your sons, and their daughters play the harlot after their gods and make your sons play the harlot after their gods.

Similarly, Numbers 25 describes violent struggles against the harlotry of the Moabites (Ruth was a Moabite), beginning:

While Israel dwelt in Shittim the people began to play the harlot with the daughters of Moab. These invited the people to the sacrifices of their gods, and the people ate, and bowed down to their gods.

In Leviticus, the Father-God's pronouncements to Moses about sexual conduct include the exhortation

"Do not profane your daughter by making her a harlot" and stipulations such as that Aaron's priestly sons must marry only virgins, not harlots or divorcees and that "the daughter of any priest, if she profanes herself by playing the harlot, profanes her father; she shall be burned by fire." Throughout, we encounter the patriarchal language of shame, defilement, lewd nakedness (male nudity being the most forbidden), sin and iniquity. When the Father-God describes to Ezekiel the quasi-symbolic harlotry of Samaria and Jerusalem, His revulsion at their defilement has a sensuous specificity:

They played the harlot in their youth; there their breasts were pressed and their virgin bosoms handled. (Ezekiel 23:3)

As Brenner points out, the Judaism of the Hebrew Bible was written by males for males: What it records is the religion of Jewish men. It has been common to assume that the religion of Jewish women was the same, for was Israel not a prototypical patriarchy? But the Bible often suggests that in fact Jewish women actually were "other" in their religion, following the Mother-Goddess in various forms while their fathers and husbands disapproved, sometimes harshly, sometimes petulantly, but seldom effectively.

When Hosea wrote in the eighth century B.C., for example, taking the role for himself of the Father-God, he identified his harlot wife Gomer with the people of Israel: even then, the identity of the nation was that of its women, its wicked harlots, the devotees of the Mother-Goddess. Hosea describes Her rites (4:11-14):

Wine and new wine take away the understanding. My people inquire of a thing of wood, and their staff gives them oracles. For a spirit of harlotry has led them astray, and they have left their God to play the harlot. They sacrifice on the tops of the mountains, and make offerings upon the hills, under oak, poplar and terebinth, because their shade is good. Therefore your daughters play the harlot, and your brides commit adultery. I will not punish your daughters when they play the harlot, nor your brides when they commit adultery; for the men themselves go aside with harlots, and sacrifice with cult prostitutes.

Although it is the men's books in general of the Hebrew Bible that have survived to influence our modern outlook, there is one women's book, the Song of Songs, or Song of Solomon, that provides direct testimony to the spirit of the Jewish women's mysteries. Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, in The Myth of the Goddess, recognize Inanna's sacred marriage in such beautiful verses as (6:10): "Who is this that looks forth like the dawn, fair as the moon, bright as the sun, terrible as an army with banners?" They point out that the verse, "I am black but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem" (1:5), refers back to the black night ruled by the Goddess, filled with mystery, wisdom and the power of regeneration, rather than to the later Iron Age darkness associated with fear and evil.

What the Hebrew Bible testifies above all is how widely sexual veneration of the Mother-Goddess spread throughout the Near East; it had become, as Brenner writes, an integral part of Mediteranean culture in the first millenium B.C. Just as the strictly clothed nomadic Jewish warriors held up their Father-God against Her in Palestine, so the naked, phallus-admiring Greek warriors fought it on different ground in the Peloponnesus.

Unlike the Hebrews, the Greeks did not rely on their religion for justification of patriarchal laws and practices; instead, they developed powerful military, athletic and intellectual subcultures that gave life meaning for their men and excluded their women. Sacred prostitution was always widely practiced in Greece, particularly in the temples of Aphrodite, most famously in her birthplace Cyprus and in Corinth. In Corinth, she was known as "Aphrodite the Courtesan" and "Aphrodite Who Writhes," and Strabo in the first century B.C. says 1000 sacred prostitutes worked in her temple there, the same number at Mount Eryx in Sicily. But the proud priestesses of love had in most cases been replaced by slaves, and though Hesiod said the sacred prostitutes, or horae, "mellowed the behavior of men," their function was more to serve men's pleasure than to enoble them through sacred contact with the Goddess.

The Greeks had been influenced early on by Crete, where the celebration of sacred marriage was a central rite of a rich, Goddess-centric civilization, as Baring and Cashford describe. Although the Myceneans borrowed much from Crete, and the Homeric pantheon was evenly divided between male and female deities, the Myceneans were already a warlike culture dominated by male heros, and mother Hera quickly became a jealous, petty-minded wife, subordinate to Zeus in a most imperfect marriage.

By the 6th century B.C., Solon's laws in Athens gave no rights to women, reducing wives to the status of servants. Common prostitutes were forced to distinguish themselves from wives by dress and behavior, and their children were explicitly denied legitimacy and citizenship. Of all Hellenic women, only the high courtesans known as hetaerae seem to have retained the legal and political rights of male citizens.

Not only that, but Greek intellectuals and spiritual leaders from Pythagoras to Plato championed the rigorous control of sexual feelings. Virtue lay in abstaining.

And yet, as in the Jewish case, it seems that true sexual reverence of the Goddess was not as rapidly or thoroughly defeated as legal, intellectual and political history would suggest. All the hints we have suggest that the older Goddess-centric attitudes were perpetuated in secret in the mystery cults. In the mysteries of Eleusis, which the writer Diodorus said came from Crete, where they were an open festival, it appears Demeter took the role played by Inanna in Sumer, ruling the endless cycle of death, fertility and rebirth, and consummating a sacred union. Of her mysteries, Mann and Lyle quote the Bishop of Amaseia, in the 5th century A.D.: "Is there not performed the descent into darkness, the venerated congress of the hierophant with the priestess, of him alone with her alone? Are not the torches extinguished and does not the vast and countless assemblage believe that in what is done by the two in the darkness is their salvation?" The wild maenads of Dionysus, too, were not only dangerous, but also lascivious. And as late as 150 A.D., the women of Corinth took strangers as lovers on the feast day of Adonis. Greek women, it appears, did not readily submit to the debased and powerless roles prescribed for them.

Rome provides a third version of the same general story. In early Rome, reverence for the fertility goddess was given great importance, and the famous Vestal Virgins may initially have been sacred prostitutes, according to Mann and Lyle. Vestal Virgins possibly underwent a form of secret marriage ceremony involving the Pontifex Maximus, who initiated them into their role as brides of the city, and the phallic deity of the Palladium. Over time, however, the meaning of the word "virgin" changed from signifying an unmarried woman to meaning an unsullied female who was patriarchal property, and the Romans developed a prudery reminiscent of the Victorians. This is not to deny the soulless and often cruel debauchery whose perverse attraction drew so many Victorians to become Latinists, but rather to point out that the Romans themselves exalted a stoic abstinence they did not necessarily practice.

But sacred prostitution lingered in Rome. Among profane prostitutes, according to Mann and Lyle, remnants of sacred sexual rituals remained. A certain class of prostitutes, lupae, or she-wolves, attracted clients with wailing howls; remember that the wolf is the symbol of Mother Rome. Underlining the link between sexual ecstasy and death, the busturariae worked in graveyards, providing sex on tombstones and funeral mourning services. The cult of Isis in Rome may have practiced sacred prostitution, Mann and Lyle write, and a cult pattern of sacred marriage emerges, according to Walter Burkert in Ancient Mystery Cults. Certainly Isis' cult wielded a great following among profane whores.

In the Roman province of Anatolia, Cybele's birthplace (now Turkey), Strabo records sexual worship in the first century B.C. He reports that children born from sacred prostitution were considered legitimate and were given the name and social status of their mothers. "The unmarried mother seems to be worshipped," he writes, according to Stone. In an Anatolian inscription from 200 A.D. a woman named Aurelia proudly announced she had served in temple by taking part in sexual customs, as had her mother and all her female ancestors.

As for ancient European veneration of the sacred whore, we can only guess at it. Nothing direct comes down to us, only scattered reports from the conquering Romans. However, Celtic mythology hints at sacred marriage rites. In Ireland, the king traditionally married the land, personified by one of three sovereignty goddesses. In Scotland, the Queen Hermutrude was said to have granted her lovers kingship, yielding her kingdom with herself. The legend of King Arthur also contains possible evidence of sacred sexual rituals. Lancelot and Mordred contend with Arthur for his kingship, including, importantly, the favors of Guinevere. If Guinevere was the sacred whore, standing in for the initiatory goddess, it was she who held true power. In Germany, Guinevere's name is "Cunneware," meaning female wisdom. As late as medieval times, a law was required in Germany to prevent people's building a hvrgr, a house of holy whores, according to Walker.

The Celtic and witch holiday of Beltaine celebrates a sacred marriage feast, crowning a May King and Queen, also called the Lord and Lady or John Thomas and Lady Jane. On May Eve, men and women go to the woods to make "green-backs," as Shakespeare puts it. From the woods, they bring home the May, hawthorn blossoms, then dance around the phallic Maypole.

Beltaine celebrants decorate the Maypole with ribbons and flowers, just as the pine tree of Attis was decorated with ribbons and violets, Baring and Cashford point out, another connection being that, after the Julian calendar was instituted, May Day was Attis's time of death and resurrection. The Green Man, connected with the May King, could be a descendent of Dumuzi, also called the "Green One." The British Morris dancers may be the last descendants of the Anatolian Corybantes, orgiastic dancers of Cybele.

In the non-Western world, among the Ewe-speaking people of the former African Slave Coast, girls ages 10 to 12 trained in temples and served priests and seminarians as sacred whores, according to Funk and Wagnall's Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend. Japan has a tradition of "Holy Mothers," according to Walker, promiscuous priestess-shamanesses who enter shrines to lie with priests possessed by the god's spirit.

In the Southern Provinces of India, large numbers of women performed as sacred whores, according to Funk and Wagnalls. They made a symbolic marriage to the gods, and their duties included dancing before the gods as well as prostitution. In India's Central Provinces, temple dancing girls with similar duties, initiated after a bargain with their parents, were dressed as brides and married to a dagger, walking several times around a central post. In Hyderabad, Hindu girls married Siva and Krishna and were called the gods' servants. The Hindu devadasis, human copies of the lascivious heavenly nymphs, were promiscuous priestesses who lay with priests possessed by the god's spirit, Walker writes. Indian Tantric rites both Hindu and Buddhist incorporate sex; the Tantric word for sacred harlot is veshya, possible a cognate of Vesta, the name of the Roman hearth-goddess.

Tantra has seen some recent popularity in the United States, but no more does the sacred whore ply her trade. Even as an archetype -- that is, a numinous image forming part of the inherited psychic structure of all people -- the sacred whore hasn't much currency in the Western world today. Current attitudes toward the strong, sexual female swing heavily toward the negative; witness the popularity of such movies as "Basic Instinct," "Fatal Attraction" and "Disclosure," all movies in which archetypally strong, sexual women figure as destructive forces and where possible are duly punished. Though it's been 2800 years since Hosea, we still need to chastise our lewd women.

The sacred whore is, by contrast, a constructive archetype. The sacred prostitute is a dynamic, transformative, ecstatic facet of the feminine, writes Qualls-Corbett; her dynamism pushes the boundaries of the individual psyche in a positive way, and she is linked to Eros, to ecstasy, to liberation from group convention, to being taken temporarily beyond yourself in a way that ever after broadens your experience of life.

She is connected to the goddess, but, importantly, she is not the goddess herself. "We can amplify the meaning of the goddess and realize the psychological implications of the image," Qualls-Corbett writes, "but ... it can never be fully integrated into consciousness. We cannot enter the realm of the gods or identify with their power; that leads to insanity, to the overwhelming of the human ego." On the psychological level, just as on the level of ritual, the sacred prostitute works as the goddess's mediatrix. She brings the ecstatic, liberating qualities of the goddess into the material world, where we can integrate them into life.

For women, she provides a role model, an image of one initiated into mysteries, who has achieved connection with the goddess of love. Qualls-Corbett calls this achievement analogous to the process whereby a woman frees herself from identification with the role of the father's daughter. Afterward, Qualls-Corbett writes, "the woman is no longer bound by the collective conscious attitude of the 'old king' father principle." One feels a certain presence in such a woman's company, Qualls-Corbett writes, "a combination of joy and wisdom. She is 'one-in-herself,' free of the confines of convention; she lives life as she chooses."

For men, the archetype of the sacred prostitute provides a channel through which sexuality can be positively integrated into life. Through her, sex is offered to the Goddess; all that frightening, obsessive, testosterone-driven instinct can be directed toward the divine female, who can take it, and who can transform it. As Sallie Tisdale writes in Talk Dirty to Me, the work of the sacred prostitute "has the potential to tease the true anxiety men feel about women, the anxiety they hide in brutality or simply bravado, tease it up to the surface to be transformed into something else -- desire, affection, rest, wonder." Once safe, sexuality can become the art of love.

The sacred prostitute can be seen also as an aspect of a man's anima, the internal feminine, muse and avatar of spirituality and gentle eroticism. To connect with her energy modifies a man's image, of himself as well as of women. The sacred prostitute within brings a man joy, laughter, beauty and an openness to love and sexuality and connects him also to creative impulses on all levels, pouring across boundaries to rejuvenate all of life.

The archetype of the sacred prostitute hasn't disappeared from the world of men; Qualls-Corbett writes she occurs frequently in her patients' dreams. But it's also clear she's far from top dog among Western society's archetypes. Power, wealth and technology are what drive the world today; that's what you'll find on the front page. Even pagans have qualms about worshipping the goddess of love: What would the neighbors think? What would my mother think -- Levana wonders -- if I reported to her the antics of the Beltaine Aphrodite shrine? I would be lying if I said I didn't care.

Yet the sacred prostitute is powerfully attractive as an archetype. The dancer in the temple, she who smiles; golden-limbed, smelling of honey, generous with sexual pleasure shot through with spiritual ecstasy: Who can deny her appeal? She holds us in her arms, takes us through dark places into light; she leads us out of ourselves, into better, stronger versions of who we could be.

Where is she in the world today? We're not the only ones looking for her. Annie Sprinkle, whose work includes the luminous video "Sluts and Goddesses," and Carole Leigh, a.k.a. the Scarlot Harlot, interviewed in this issue, spring quickly to mind. Despite, or perhaps in reaction to, the offensive of the anti-pornographers of the Christian Right and the sex-negative feminist wing, writers such as Pat Califia, Carol Queen, Susie Bright and Sallie Tisdale have entered the hierodule's territory. Still, you can't walk down to the corner with the price in your hand, as you could in Sumer, and find the temple of the sacred whore.



Diana Rose Hartmann


Amera Ziganii Rao. A Profile 

Amera Ziganii Rao is a philosophical writer, essayist, social commentator, prose writer, dramatist and photographer artist as well as a consciousness explorer, self actualiser and emotional healer. She is a former journalist who is now turning professional with her art forms and indeed, her healing forms, after a long journey of inner searching, self teaching and exploring many layers and areas of both craft and wisdom. She is now working on her first book of philosophy and esoteric thought, and social and cultural commentary. She is also showing her first photography collections. And last but most definitely not least, she is building a business to share her consciousness and empowering explorations to reach as many people as possible across the world. She is 46 years old and currently lives in London.

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Writer and Enlightener, Amera Ziganii Rao, is now putting together a comprehensive and unique programme of Education For Liberation. Liberation of the lower mind into the higher mind, the soul and the inner heart and therefore one's true, confident, happy, successful, creative, sexual, sensual, individual, intelligent, emotionally healed, capable of loving and being loved self. Based on her scholarly and non scholarly work over 14 years, if not for her whole life, and her extensive and intense, visceral experiences of self transformation from resignation, cynicism and despair to a state of bliss, the courses will cover the method of change. The psychological, sociological, spiritual, cultural, political, emotional and physical and even anthropological methods of change. Why we are here. The meaning of life, no less. This will be on offer in the near future, in the form of online courses and live events, to begin with......In the meantime, please enjoy this website. I have included many of the subjects I am covering, areas of experience and insight that I will be exploring to the fullest in my book, the courses and all the other work that is to come as a dramatist, novelist and essayist. I also of course, include many of the wise people on this planet, who have come long before me; authors, screen dramatists, playwrights, film makers, artists, and other enlighteners and grand carriers of the wisdom I have found the most helpful on my journey, to find peace and become enlightened. The seemingly impossible journey, in the face of oneself and one’s circumstances. People who have contributed massively to my healing on this mad journey called life. People who have helped to make me as good a carrier of wisdom as I in turn, can be. Thank you.

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Thank you to outside source for the artwork. Darkroomed by Amera Ziganii Rao
Thank you to the author for the excerpt.