[1061]. The history of ritual thus shows that it tends to grow in elaborateness and importance as social forms become more elaborate and important—the mode of approaching the deity imitates the mode of approaching human dignitaries, postures are borrowed from current etiquette.[1922] Form was especially sought after under the old monarchies, Egyptian and Assyrian.[1923] The exaggerated Oriental court etiquette, introduced into Roman life as early as the time of Diocletian, was maintained and developed under the Byzantine emperors.[1924] These usages may have affected the growth of the Greek and Roman Church liturgies.[1925] In modern China, under the imperial government, divine worship was substantially identical in form with the worship of the emperor. In some cases it may be doubtful in which direction the borrowing has been.
The expansion of liturgical forms has often been accompanied by the effort to interpret them symbolically. Intelligent reflection has led to the conviction that forms without religious meaning are valueless, and it has been easy, after ceremonies were established, to attach spiritual definitions to their details. This relieves their materialism, and gives a certain realness and force to religious feeling.
Priests[1926]
[1062]. A priest is a person commissioned by the community or its head to conduct the sacrificial service and related services connected with shrines. Such a person differs in two respects from the religious official of the simplest times, the magician (shaman, or medicine man): the latter acts in his own name and by his own authority, and the methods he employs are magical—they are based on the belief that the supernatural Powers are subject to law and may be controlled by one who knows this law; the priest acts in the name and by the authority of the community, and his methods are dictated by the friendly social relation existing between the community and the Powers. He differs, further, from those religious ministrants (chiefs of clans, fathers of families, and other prominent men) who acted by virtue of their social or political positions in that his functions are solely religious and are in that regard distinct from his civil position. He represents a differentiation of functions in an orderly nonmagical religious society. Such an office can arise only under a tolerably well-organized civil government and a fairly well-defined sacrificial ritual. It is doubtless a slow growth, and there may be, in a community, a period of transition from one grade of religious ministers to another when the distinction between the priest and the magician or between the priest and the headman is hardly recognizable; the distinction comes, however, to be well marked, and then indicates an important turning-point in religious history. It may be, also, that at certain times under certain circumstances the civil ruler may have priestly functions or the priest may exercise civil authority; but these exceptional cases do not affect the specific character of the sacerdotal office.
[1063]. The priest is a sacred person, and is affected by all the conditions pertaining to the conception of "sacred." In early times he has to be guarded against contamination by impure or common (profane) things, and care has to be taken that his quality of sacredness be not injuriously communicated to other persons or to any object.[1927] The parts of his person, such as hair and nail-parings, must not be touched by common folk. The dress worn by him when performing his sacred duties must be changed when he comes out to mix with the people. He must keep his body clean, and the food that he may or may not eat is determined by custom or by law. His sexual relations are defined—sometimes he is forbidden to marry or to approach a woman, sometimes the prohibition extends only to marriage with a certain sort of woman (a foreigner, a widow, or a harlot). In some cases he is forbidden to engage in warfare or to shed human blood;[1928] the ground of this prohibition was physical, not moral.[1929]
[1064]. Similar rules in regard to food, marriage, chastity applied to priestesses.[1930] Women were often, in ancient times, the ministrants in the shrines of female deities—there was a certain propriety in this arrangement; they were, however, in some cases attached to the service of male deities.[1931] Their duties were in general of a secondary character: they rarely, if ever, offered sacrifice;[1932] they were often in charge of the temple-music; the function of soothsaying or of the interpretation of oracular sayings was sometimes assigned them. On the other hand, female ministrants in temples, who were closely connected with temple duties, were sometimes considered as wives of the god, and in some cases had sexual relations with priests and worshipers, and became public prostitutes.[1933] This custom does not exist among the lowest tribes, and it attained its largest development in some of the great civilized cults. It seems not to have existed in Egypt.[1934] The consecrated maidens described in the Code of Hammurabi appear to have been chaste and respected;[1935] the relation between these and the harlots of the early Ishtar cult is not clear. A distinction may be made between priestesses proper and maidens (hierodules) consecrated to such a deity as Aphrodite Pandemos; Solon's erection of a temple to this goddess, which he supplied with women, may have been an attempt to control the cult of the hetæræ. The thousand hierodules at Corinth[1936] were probably not priestesses, and the same thing may be surmised to be true of the women devoted to the Semitic prototype of Aphrodite, the Syrian Ashtart (Astarte), and to the Babylonian Ishtar.[1937]
[1065]. The origin of temple prostitution is not clear. In many cases (in Greece, Rome, Mexico, Peru, and elsewhere) the consecrated women were required to be virgins and to remain chaste—this higher conception is obviously the natural one in a civilized community in which the purity of wives and daughters is strictly guarded. The old idea that sexual union was defiling may have originated or strengthened the demand for chastity. The institution of the lower class of women does not seem to have originated in a society in which this regard for purity is lacking, for the hierodulic class is rarely if ever found in existing societies of this sort. The origin of the class is not to be sought in a low valuation of woman, nor, on the other hand, is it to be found in a desire to secure fruitfulness; fruitfulness is generally secured by offerings to the gods, and though the belief has doubtless existed that it could be secured by commerce with a supernatural being,[1938] there is no trace of this belief in the accounts of the lives of the hierodules; the benefit would be restricted also to a small number of women. Probably the custom was developed gradually and, like other such customs, had its ground in simple needs. Women were required for the menial work of shrines.[1939] Once established in service, they would acquire a certain sanctity and power by their relation to sacred things, and at the same time would, as unattached, be sought by men. Their privileges and license would grow with time—they would become an organized body, and would seek to increase their power. In the course of time current religious ideas, low or high, would attach to them. They would be supposed to be in the confidence of the deity, able to interpret his will, and endowed with the power of cursing or blessing.[1940] With the growth of refinement they would be thought of as servants of the deity, belonging to him and to no other, and might be described, as in fact they are sometimes described, as his wives. The title "wife" would be compatible with purity in the higher religious systems, but in the lower systems would be connected with license.
[1066]. Theories of the origin of religious prostitution. The license just referred to is a part of a widespread custom of the prostitution of sacred persons, of which various explanations have been offered.[1941] The existence of the custom is attested for the larger part of the ancient civilized and half-civilized world, and for many more recent peoples. In old Babylonia, Canaan, Syria, Phœnicia, Asia Minor, Armenia, Greece, and now in West Africa and India, we find officially appointed "sacred" women a part of whose religious duty it was or is to offer themselves to men.[1942] The service in ancient times was not regarded as degrading; on the contrary, maidens of the noblest families were sometimes so dedicated, and the rôle of devotee might be continued in a family for generations.[1943] Such service was sometimes a necessary preliminary to marriage. This seems to be the case in the custom reported by Herodotus[1944] that every native Babylonian woman had, once in her life, to sit in the temple of Mylitta (Ishtar) and wait till a piece of money was thrown into her lap by a stranger, to whom she must then submit herself—this duty to the goddess accomplished, she lived chastely. In Byblos a woman who refused to sacrifice her hair to Ashtart on a certain festival day had to yield herself to a stranger.[1945]
Official male prostitutes also there were in some ancient cults; but information about such persons is scanty, and they seem not to have been numerous.[1946] The most definitely named case is that of the Hebrew official class called kedeshim, that is, persons devoted to the service of the deity and therefore sacred[1947] (as it is said in Zech. xiv, 20 ff., that bells on horses and temple-vessels shall be sacred to Yahweh). These, together with the female devotees, kedeshot ("prostitutes"), are denounced as abhorrent to Yahweh; both were features in the ritual of the Jerusalem temple of the seventh century B.C. and apparently earlier.[1948] The female devotee is called a "harlot" and the male a "dog" (kalb). The original religious sense of the latter term is uncertain. In the Old Testament it occurs, in this sense, only in the passage cited above. In a Phœnician inscription of Larnaca (in Cyprus)[1949] the plural of the word designates a class of attendants in a temple of Ashtart, and there are proper names in which the term is an element (and therefore an honorable title). It is not improbable that it meant originally simply a devotee or minister of a god in a temple,[1950] the bad sense having been attached to it in the Old Testament from the license sometimes practiced by such ministers.
The sentiment of chastity is a product of the highest civilization. In many savage and half-civilized tribes the obligation on a woman to keep herself pure is not fully recognized, and in the case of married women the opposition to unfaithfulness sometimes springs from the view that it is a violation of the husband's right of property in the wife. In some ancient civilized communities a god's right to a woman seems to have been taken for granted.[1951] Ordinary prostitution seems to have existed in the world, in all grades of civilization, from the earliest times. This attitude toward the custom being so widespread, it is not strange that it has established itself in religious organizations.