Excerpt from ‘The female experience and the nature of the divine’ by Judith Ochshorn, 1981
What seems to have been the case in the ancient Near East, then, for most of the period from the third to the first millennium, is that both women and men performed sacred sexual rites in the service of female and male deities and, once again, the sex of the priest or participant was not a determining ground for inclusion or exclusion from these rites. While the purpose of these sexual rites apparently moved from the sacred to the profane with the passage of time, and perhaps especially so by sometime in the first millennium, attitudes toward sexuality in the earlier millennia appear to have been far more open, less judgmental, and different from our own. In most instances, female sexuality was not regarded with fear or ambivalence but was seen as an integral part of sacred rituals and therefore important to community life. Hierodules either represented goddesses in their sexual aspect or were “brides” of gods, and apparently monogamy and motherhood were not particularly linked with the roles of women in cult. There was no denigration of either sex involved in sacred rites on the basis of their biological functions, and the consequences of sexuality were often viewed as divinely inspired and beneficial to the community.
In many parts of the ancient Near East from the third to the first millennium, priestesses and female devotees of Ishtar, or her counterparts Kybele, Asherah, Aphrodite, or Astarte, lived in and around temples devoted to these divinities. Although they have sometimes since been described as “harlots” or “ritual prostitutes,” they were known in their own times and places, especially in the carlier years of this period, as quadishtu, “holy women,” or ishtaritu, “women of Ishtar”.
They engaged in sacred rites that often included a free and active sexual life, in celebration of the active sexual aspect of the goddess they served, who was seen by people of those times as the source of fertility and abundance for the community. They were the hierodules of the temple just as Inanna was the hierodule of Heaven. And as representatives of the goddesses, the chief priestesses of Inanna/Ishtar participated in the Sacred Marriage rites, commemorated in rapturous poetry and theology for two thousand years.
In Mesopotamia there were several classes of priestesses, but there is only limited information about a number of their functions. It appears that some of these sexually active priestesses could marry, but few were permitted to bear children to their own husbands, so they sometimes provided the latter with substitutes for this purpose. When priestesses did bear children they evidently retained them. That the carly status of these quadishtu was high, and that the sacred sexual rites, which involved having intercourse with men outside of marriage, were indeed considered sacred, are attested by the references to these priestesses as “the sacred ones,” “the pure ones,” “the holy ones.” In Babylonia and Assyria, the active sexuality of the priestesses attached to Ishtar’s temples in many cities was recognized as part of the goddess’s religious rites.
From about 1910 to 1840, and then from about 1813 to 1781 B.C.E., Assyrian merchants penetrated Asia Minor. The region was then divided into small city-states, each of them ruled by a princess or prince whose subjects were Hittites, Luwians, Hurrians, and Semitic Amorites. In many aristocratic families from this area, at least one daughter would be dedicated to the service of the god Ashur, or to one or another of the female or male protective deities, as gubbatum or quadishtum, the holy women of Ishtar. The Babylonian Code of Hammurabi (ca.1700 B.C.E.) mentioned various classes of women connected with the temples, of whom the most exalted in rank was the entum, or high priestess and “bride” of the male deity. Some of them were the daughters and sisters of kings. Another numerous class of priestesses from upper-class families, the naditum, were simultaneously regarded as the wives of the reigning male deities and the hierodules of the temple, and they also were prominent in local civil and economic life.
In addition to these upper-class women who were votaries of the tutelar goddess and practitioners of her sacred sexual rites, there were still other groups of temple women mentioned in the Code, such as the sikirtum or kulmasitum. Though their specific duties are obscure, it seems fairly clear that they were also part of the general class of hierodules. And the sanctity of the sexual rites practiced by both the priestesses and the lay votaries of the goddess was widely acknowledged. Hierodules frequented the Phoenician temples of Astarte, the Ashtoreth of the Old Testament. Ritual sexual practices played an important part in Semitic religious ceremonies, and it was not uncommon for them to occur in places like threshing-floors, associated with the earth’s fertility. But gradually, by the first millennium, the holiness of sexual acts performed in and near the temples gave way to profane prostitution.
What may be less frequently realized is that there were male counterparts to these “holy women” who also practiced the sacred sexual rites of the great goddesses. For example, men as well as women were hierodules of some of the same temples of Ishtar in Babylonia. The fertility-cult of Canaan had its full complement of “ritual prostitutes” of both sexes, quedesim and quedesoth. By the mid-Assyrian period, and under Greco-Roman rule, Near Eastern temples employed thousands of hierodules of both sexes. And while Josiah ruled over the Hebrews (ca.639-609 B.C.E.), he destroyed the quarters of the qedeshim, the “male cult prostitutes” who were housed in the Temple of Jerusalem, in fact in the very part of the temple where women wove clothing for Asherah, the mother-goddess (2 Kings 23:7).
