The association of sexuality with religion affects both sexes equally, although the phenomenon appears more intense in woman, and is more enduring in her, owing to the greater depth of her emotional life. The brothers de Goncourt, in their diary, describe religion as simply a portion of woman’s sexual life. Feminine sexual activity thus appears something religious, pious, holy. And those priests who pretended to “sanctify” by their love the women whom they seduced, were certainly more accurate, from the physiological point of view, than the Church was in its condemnation of carnal lust as sin and the work of the devil. In the middle ages it was a view commonly held in France that women who had intercourse with priests were in some sort sanctified thereby. The mistresses of priests were called the “consecrated.”
The identity of religious and sexual perceptions explains the frequent transformation of one into the other, and the continuous association between the two. A sexual emotion will often function vicariously for a religious emotion, in part or wholly.
The unusually interesting history of the complicated and remarkable religio-sexual phenomena renders clear to us individual processes of this kind and certain peculiarities of racial psychology; and thereby we are led to understand the powerful after-effects of these phenomena in the customs, the morals, and the conventions of our time, and we are enlightened as to the rôle still played by the religio-sexual factor in the life of many men even of our own day.
One of the oldest, if not the oldest, of religio-sexual phenomena is religious prostitution—the “lust-sacrifice,” as Eduard von Mayer happily expresses it—since therein the sexual act is regarded as a sacrifice made to the deity. We have here the unrestricted offering by a woman of her body to every chance comer without love, as an act of simple sensuality, and for payment, and thus we find all the characteristics of what at the present day we term “prostitution.”
According to the researches I have myself previously published regarding religious prostitution, this may be divided into two great groups:
1. A single act of prostitution in honour of the deity.
2. Permanent religious prostitution.
A single act of religious prostitution mostly consists in the offering of virginity; sometimes also in the single, not repeated, offering of an already deflowered woman. In the single act of religious prostitution, the woman either offers herself directly to the deity, the bodily act of defloration being effected by a divine physical symbol—as, for instance, by a penis made of stone, ivory, or wood—or by direct intercourse with the statue of the god; or else the woman gives herself to a human representative of the deity—for instance, to the king, to a priest, to a blood-relative (not seldom to her own father, this being a variety of religious incest), and sometimes to a passing stranger.[39]
With regard to the first mode of defloration, by means of a divine symbol, we have especially full reports from the East Indies. Here, in the sixteenth century, in the Southern Deccan, the Portuguese Duarte Barbosa first saw the religious defloration of girls effected by means of the “lingam,” the divine phallus. Girls aged ten years only were sacrificed to the deity in this brutal manner. From a later time come the accounts of Jan Huygen van Linschoten and Gasparo Balbi, regarding the customs of the inhabitants of Goa. The bride was taken into the temple, where a penis of iron or ivory was thrust into the vagina, so that the hymen was destroyed. In other cases, the girl’s genitals were brought into contact with the stone penis of an image of the god, at a shrine eighteen miles distant from Goa. W. Schultze, in his “East Indian Journey” (Amsterdam, 1676, p. 161a), relates:
“By means of this priapus, with the assistance of friends and relatives, the maiden was deprived of her virginity with force and in a painful manner; at the same time the bridegroom rejoiced that the foul and accursed idol had done him this honour, in the hope that as a result of this sacrifice he would enjoy greater happiness in his marriage.”