There is reference to the personal seductive persuasiveness of the harlot’s coaxing words, the urgency of her erotic devices.
The Old Testament mentions and illustrates the morality involved in sexual impulses resulting in physiological consummations. Under certain circumstances, stoning the guilty pair was enjoined. In some cases, the man only was punished, by death. In other situations the man who spurned the woman after carnally knowing her was whipped and fined one hundred shekels of silver. For fornication, the death penalty was normally enforced. Sacred prostitution in the temple, too, whether affecting male or female, was prohibited.
Homosexuality and sacred male prostitution are both known to the Bible. In Deuteronomy there is an injunction against the sons of Israel becoming sacred prostitutes. The abominations of Sodom receive ample treatment. Even transvestism is prohibited, for it suggests sexual dubiety, physiological ambiguity, and a possible merging of the sexes, a potential elimination of the sexual demarcations. Other amatory abnormalities also appear in Biblical contexts, among them: rape, voyeurism, and bestiality.
With the onset of the Hellenistic Age, concurrent with Alexander the Great’s death in 323 B.C., the Mysteries, the exclusive secretive cults, advanced in importance and in the extent of their influence. Many of these cults came from the East and merged, with adaptations and various amplifications or modifications, into the Greek and Roman religious sphere. The cult of Cybele, Magna Mater Deorum, the Mighty Mother of the gods, was most dominant, transcending all other cults and to some degree absorbing them. In addition, there were the cults of Sabazios, of Mithras, of Isis and Osiris. These cults bound the initiates to close secrecy: and thus only occasional fragments, hints, references from various sources can present any degree of coherence and design in the cults. It is known that there were dramatic presentations involving communion with the deities, dark rites and ceremonials, even vague adumbrations of the concept of immortality, as well as castigation and castration, fertility symbolisms and seasonal fructifying cycles. There were, further, the Gnostics, searchers for divine knowledge. Some of these speculative cosmologists were scrupulously ascetic in every sense, while others orgiastically indulged, toward the attainment of the same end, in fleshly passions.
At the Greek celebration of the Phallophoria, leather or wooden representations of the phallus were carried processionally through the public streets of the polis. It was the thematic manifestation of all-embracing fertility, on land, among the beasts of the fields, and in human relationships. It was a kind of visual paean, in fact, to the primal sexual impulse, to the basic erotic conflict.