Shortt gives further interesting details of these temple prostitutes, who are also known as “thassee.”
Religious prostitution is to a certain extent still practised in Southern Borneo; and in a newspaper published at Amsterdam—The German Weekly News of the Netherlands—the following account of the practice appears in the issue of July 30, 1907:
“In the Dyak country there are to be found in nearly every kampong (village) individuals known as ‘balians’ and ‘basirs.’ The balians are prostitutes who also perform medical services. The basirs are men who dress in women’s clothing, and in other respects perform the same functions as the balians, but not all the basirs act in this way. Balians and basirs are also commonly employed to perform certain religious ceremonies, on festal occasions, at marriages, funerals, births, etc. According to the nature of the festivity, five to fifteen of them officiate. The president of the balians and basirs goes by the name of the ‘upu’; usually the oldest and most experienced is chosen for this office. The upu sits in the middle, with the others to right and left. At an important festival the upu receives from twenty to thirty gulden; the others one to fifteen gulden. The further away that a balian sits from the upu, the smaller is her honorarium; the honorarium is called ‘laluh.’ The principal balians and basirs are known as ‘bawimait maninjan sangjang’—that is, ‘holy women.’ At the present time the basirs no longer exercise the immoral portions of their duties, because the Government inflicts severe penalties if they do so; moreover, they are not allowed now to appear in public in women’s clothing.”
Religion shares with the sexual impulse the unceasing yearning, the sentiment of everlastingness, the mystic absorption into the depths of life, the longing for the coalescence of individualities in an eternally blessed union, free from earthly fetters. Hence the longing for death felt by lovers and by mystically enraptured pietists, which has been so wonderfully described by Leopardi. “The yearning for death felt by lovers is identical with the yearning for sexual union,” aptly remarks H. Swoboda, and he very rightly points out that many a suicide ascribed to “unfortunate love” is rather the result of a happy love.
Among primitive peoples, and in ancient times, religio-erotic festivals first gave an opportunity for the manifestation of this religio-sexual mysticism. In this the transition of religious ecstasy into sexual perceptions is very clearly visible, and in the sexual orgies in which these religious frenzies often found an appropriate finale we see the crudest expression of the relationship between religion and sexuality. In such cases sexual ardour appears to be equivalent to a prolongation and an increase of the religious ardour—fundamentally, radically coincident, as the natural earthly discharge of an ecstatic tension directed to the sphere of the remote and the metaphysical.
The fact that such sexual excesses are throughout the world found in association with religion, that since the very earliest times they have been connected with the most various forms of religion, proves once more that the origin of this relationship is dependent on the very nature of religion as such, and that it is not in any way due to the individual historic character of any one belief. It is, moreover, quite uncritical and altogether without justification for any modern writer to endeavour to make Roman Catholicism responsible for such an association; Roman Catholicism as such has as little to do with the matter as all other beliefs. Religio-sexual phenomena belong to the everywhere recurring elementary ideas of the human race (elementary ideas in the sense of Bastian); and the only way of regarding such phenomena that can be considered scientifically sound, is from the anthropological and ethnological standpoint.
This sexual religious mysticism meets us everywhere—in the religious festivals of antiquity, the festivals of Isis in Egypt, and the festivals of imperial Rome, both alike accompanied by the wildest sexual orgies; in the festivals of Baal Peor, among the Jews, in the Venus and Adonis festivals of the Phœnicians, in Cyprus and Byblos, in the Aphrodisian, the Dionysian, and the Eleusinian festivals of the Hellenes; in the festival of Flora in Rome, in which prostitutes ran about naked; in the Roman Bacchanalia; and in the festival of the bona dea, the wild sexual licence of which is only too clearly presented to our eyes in the celebrated account of Juvenal.
In India, the sect of Caitanya, founded in the sixteenth century, celebrated the maddest religio-sexual orgies. Their ritual consisted principally of long litanies and hymns, stuffed full with unbridled eroticism, and followed by wild dances, all leading up to the sexual culmination, in which “the love of God” (bhakti) was to be made as clearly perceptible as possible.[52] Even worse were the Sakta sects (the name is derived from sakti, force—that is, the sensuous manifestation of the god Siva). They gave themselves up with ardent sensuality to the service of the female emanations of Siva, all distinctions of caste being ignored, and wild sensual promiscuity prevailing. Divine service always preceded the act of sexual intercourse.
Among the Kauchiluas, one of these Sakta sects, each of the women who took part in these divine services threw a small ornament into a box kept by the priests. After the termination of the religious festival, each male member of the congregation took one of these articles out of the box, whereupon the possessor of the article must give herself to him in the subsequent unbridled sexual excesses, even if the two should happen to be brother and sister.[53]
Ancient Central and South America were also familiar with wild outbreaks of a sexual-religious character. In Guatemala, on the days of the great sacrifices, there occurred sexual orgies of the worst kind, men having intercourse promiscuously with mothers, sisters, daughters, children, and concubines; and at the “Akhataymita festivals” of the ancient Peruvians, the religious observances terminated in a race between completely nude men and women, in which each man overtaking a woman immediately had sexual intercourse with her.[54]