Sex ở Bắc Bộ Phủ
[Sex in the temples]

Sex in the temples

HELEN MORALES
Stephanie Budin
THE MYTH OF SACRED PROSTITUTION IN ANTIQUITY
366pp. Cambridge University Press. £50 (US $90). 9780521880909

The ancient practice of sacred prostitution is frequently held up in modern popular culture as a paradigm of female sexual empowerment. There is nostalgia for the time when priestesses made love to men as a holy rite and spiritual service; the sacred whores of antiquity, we are told, can help you find your "inner seductress". The ancients themselves took a rather different view of sacred prostitution (also called temple or ritual prostitution). The influential account of Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC, describes "the most shameful of the customs among Babylonians" in which every local woman, once in her lifetime, was made to sit in the sanctuary of Aphrodite in order to "mingle" with a foreign man. Each woman would sit and wait for a foreigner to throw a silver coin in her lap and say "I summon you by the goddess Mylitta" (the Assyrian name for Aphrodite). After the "mingling", the silver was dedicated to the goddess and the woman could then go home. Pity the unattractive Babylonian girl: she might end up sitting in the sanctuary for three or four years, we are told, before anyone picked her.
Sacred prostitution, the selling of sex for the financial benefit of a deity, is said to have taken two forms: a "one-off' event, such as that described by Herodotus, usually the ritual deflowering of virgins by strangers, and the longer-term employment of professional prostitutes by the temple. Stephanie Budin's thesis in The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity is not that some of this presents a distorted picture, but that in fact sacred prostitution never existed in the ancient Near East or Mediterranean. Instead, it is a "literary construct", a mirage. If she is right - and her arguments are compelling - then our picture of ancient history and religion has been scandalously and embarrassingly incorrect. This will not be news to some, as the existence of sacred prostitution has been challenged since the 1960s, by scholars of the Near East, notably Robert Oden and Julia Assante, and by classicists such as Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge, Fay Glinister, Mary Beard and John Henderson. However, the value of Budin's book lies in its systematic and meticulous examination of each and every piece of "evidence", from classical antiquity and the ancient Near East, and clear argumentation as to why none of it convincingly demonstrates sacred prostitution.
Not that Budin is pushing at an entirely open door. Only recently James Davidson, a well-known authority on ancient prostitution, firmly stated in the TLS (October 5, 2007): "Sacred prostitution is not yet a myth, nor even a 'myth', in the ordinary understanding of that term, however much modern scholars wish it were". Budin's painstaking dismantling of the material is persuasive, even when her alternative interpretations prove less so. One need not subscribe to the view that Herodotus' account of the Babylonian custom was a metaphor for the conquest of Babylon by Persia ("conquered, effeminized, and symbolically 'raped''') to question its veracity. Its main rhetorical purpose was to present the Babylonian custom as an inversion of Greek norms. Indeed, some have argued that the myth of sacred prostitution first arose  because scholars took literally what was intended to be accusatory rhetoric, a means of denigrating other cultures, rather like accusations of cannibalism and human sacrifice.
Budin argues that this theory works for us some of the evidence, especially the Christian texts, but that simple misreading and error, exacerbated by over two millennia of bad scholarship, are also responsible. For example, the Sumerian, Akkadian, Canaanite , and Hebrew vocabulary typically translated as relating to sacred prostitution does not refer to prostitutes at all, let alone sacred ones. Archaeological and iconographic evidence, she shows, has been interpreted on the basis that sacred prostitution existed. In tracing a history of the myth of sacred prostitution, Budin also scotches another misapprehension: that Sir James Frazer made it up in the Golden Bough. We cannot let the Victorians take all the blame.
The book is a thrilling expose of historiography at its worst. It shows the mess that can result when disciplinary divisions work against multicultural understanding (allowing Assyriologists and classicists to claim that sacred prostitution was practised, but on the others' turf, not their own) and how a scholarly myth can spread "like a computer virus" until it becomes accepted historical fact. But radical scepticism might be thought to work in a similar way. Budin's overall thesis may be sound, but I cannot help worrying about what would happen if we applied her approach to other subjects. If we rejected all evidence from writers who sometimes fabricated their material, and from all narratives that can be read rhetorically, metaphorically or as ideologically loaded in some way, we could easily dispatch as "myth" any form of ancient prostitution and, with a bit more effort, maybe marriage, swimming or warfare. This might lead to as unintelligent a version of ancient history as that produced by clumsy positivism.

TLS May 15 2009