In Athens, there was an old quarter of the city dedicated to prostitution of the lowest type. This area was known as the Ceramicus.
The agents who acted as intermediaries, as panders and procurers and enticers in the furtive sexual commerce, in the seamy undercurrents of ancient life, were known under various descriptive designations. In Greece, there were the maulis and the draxon, the karbis and the proagogos, the mastropos, the prokyklis and the nymphagogos and the pornoboscos. Romans had their own counterparts: the professional procurer, the leno, the mercator meretricius, the admissarius and the institor, the lenonum minister, the perductor and the conductor: and, among the female operatives, the agaga and the stimulatrix, the conciliatrix and the stupri sequestra.
Phallic symbols enter into the Biblical context in I Kings, where Judah is described as building high places and pillars on every high hill. These pillars were actually phallic symbols, in the style of the abominations of the Canaanite cults.
In antiquity, in Biblical and post-Biblical times, the woman, in the widest sense, was the amatory slave of man. But with the woman’s increase of knowledge in erotic skills and practices, in the secrets of her potent physiological attractions, in the use of unguents and cosmetics, potions and concoctions, in corporeal and mechanistic allurements and seductions, the woman’s status gradually rose and extended and became all-embracing. Slowly, by virtue of these very artifices and techniques, by means of gyrations and gestures, provocative dances and tantalizing dress, silent invitations and ocular speech, she began to dominate man, to render him subservient and even obsequious, to control his habits and inclinations and tendencies in social and political directions: until woman, reaching the apogee of her power, based primarily on her erotic compulsiveness, became the woman behind the throne. She had attained her highest end, her ultimate destiny, as the implicit director of human activities. She usurped man’s status, and assumed the regal baton. She manipulated kings and sultans, and her endearments were bought at the price of nations. She decided the fate of empires by her mere brusque whims, or personal resentment, her unpredictable likes. Man exchanged realms and justice for her amatory acquiescence, her erotic beneficence.
In a formal religious-ceremonial sense, antiquity acknowledged participation of women in the sacred temples. In Asia Minor, in the cults of Baal-Peor, in the Egyptian cults of Isis and Osiris, in the Mediterranean Hellenic islands where the cult of Aphrodite in various forms and of analogous deities of passion and lust and procreation was prevalent, in the case of the Vestal guardians of the Roman state religion, priestesses took part in the hieratic rituals, in festive ceremonials, in sacrificial and processional rites.
Even with the advent of Christianity the Greek church in the East had its female votaries, while deaconesses were normally attached to the Church in the West. In the course of time, however, this acquiescence in a female priesthood turned into resentment, into hate, and finally into bitter and continuous official condemnation. Woman became the evil daemon, the essence of every malefic, licentious, forbidden, obscene practice, the sink of turpitude, the scourge of men, the destruction of humanity. Thus many early Fathers of the Church, Tertullian and Arnobius and Clement of Alexandria, inveigh against the serpentine machinations of woman. Hence this view and these attitudes were transmitted into the Middle Ages. In these middle centuries woman is depicted as the ally of Satanic forces, powerful on account of her very femininity, her presumed innocent frailty. She is essentially guileful and treacherous, amoral and immoral, and bent on the spiritual subjugation and desecration of perplexed man. Woman became the symbol of all sin, the prototype of every sacrilegious concept. She was stripped of a soul. She was in league with the demoniac tenebrous forces, the Satanic legions that furtively and thaumaturgically work their evil spells on man. She became, in short, the Anti-Christ incarnate, the Abominable Witch, consort of horned and hoofed Satan. And her attractions, her feminine beauty, were merely distorted and insidious forms of her fundamental iniquities.