The other custom recorded by Herodotus of Babylon, the consecration of the first-fruits of virginity to the goddess before marriage, which I have considered as distinct from the foregoing, may often have been combined or confused with it; for the temple-harlotry, carried on for some considerable period, might be occasionally a preliminary to marriage. The most exact parallels to the Babylonian custom are found in the records of Byblos, Cyprus, and the Syrian Heliopolis or Baalbec. Lucian attests the rule prevailing at Byblos, that in the festival of Adonis women exposed themselves for purchase on one single day, and that only strangers were allowed to enjoy them; but that this service was only imposed upon them if they refused to cut off their hair in lamentation for Adonis.[274.1] Similarly the Byzantine historian Sozomenos declared that at Heliopolis (Baalbec), in the temple of Astarte, each maiden was obliged to prostitute herself before marriage, until the custom and the cult were abolished by Constantine.[274.2] The statements about Cyprus, though less explicit, point to the same institution: Herodotus, having described at length the Babylonian practice, declares that it prevailed in Cyprus also, and Justin[274.3] that it was a custom of the Cyprians “to send their virgins before marriage on fixed days to the shore, to earn their dowry by prostitution, so as to pay a first-offering to Venus for their virtue henceforth (pro reliqua pudicitia libamenta Veneri soluturas).” The procession to the shore may indicate the rule that intercourse was only allowed them with strangers,[274.4] and nothing points to prolonged prostitution. It is probably the same rite that the Locrians of the West vowed to perform in honour of Aphrodite in the event of deliverance from a dangerous war.[275.1] But in the worship of Anaitis at Akilisene in Armenia, according to Strabo,[275.2] the unmarried women served as temple-harlots for an indefinite time until they married; and Aurelia Aemilia of Tralles may have been only maintaining the same ancient ritual in Lydia. In these two countries, then, it seems as if there had been a fusion of two institutions that elsewhere were distinct one from another, harlot-service for a prolonged period in a temple, and the consecration of each maiden’s virginity as a preliminary to marriage.
Such institutions mark the sharpest antagonism between the early religious sentiment of the East and the West. Of no European State is there any record, religious or other, that the sacrifice before marriage of a woman’s virginity to a mortal was at any time regarded as demanded by temple ritual. Such a rite was abhorrent to the genuine Hellenic, as it was to the Hebraic, spirit; and only in later times do we find one or two Hellenic cult-centres catching the taint of the Oriental tradition: while such legends as that of Melanippos and Komaitho and the story of Laokoon’s sin express the feeling of horror which any sexual licence in a temple aroused in the Greek.[275.3]
It is imperative to try to understand the original purpose or significance of the Semitic and Anatolian rites that we have been dealing with. To regard them as the early Christian and some modern writers have done, as mere examples of unbridled Oriental lust masquerading in the guise of religion, is a false and unjust view. According to Herodotus, the same society that ordained this sacrifice of virginity upon the daughters of families maintained in other respects a high standard of virtue, which appears also attested by Babylonian religious and secular documents. Modern anthropology has handled the problem with greater insight and seriousness; but certain current explanations are not convincing. To take the rite described by Herodotus first, which is always to be distinguished from the permanent institution of “hierodulai” in the sense of temple-harlots: Mannhardt, who was the first to apply modern science to the problem, explained it as a development of vegetation-ritual.[276.1] Aphrodite and Adonis, Ishtar and Tammuz, represent vegetation, and their yearly union causes general fertility; the women are playing the part of the goddess, and the stranger represents Adonis! The Babylonian rite, then, is partly religious μιμησις, the human acting of a divine drama, partly religious magic good for the crops. But in spite of Mannhardt’s great and real services to science, his vegetation-theory leads him often astray, and only one who was desperately defending a thesis would explain that stranger, a necessary personage in the ritual at Babylon, Byblos, Cyprus, and Baalbec, as the native god. There is no kind of reason for connecting the Babylonian rite with Tammuz, or for supposing that the women were representing the goddess,[277.1] or that their act directly influenced the crops, except in the sense that all due performance of religious ceremonies has been considered at certain stages of belief as favouring the prosperity of the land. Sir William Ramsay, in his Cities and Bishoprics of Phrygia,[277.2] would explain the custom as preserving the tradition of the communism of women before regular marriage was instituted. Dr. Frazer, who has dealt more fully with the question, accepts this explanation,[277.3] as he also accepts Mannhardt’s in full; and, while he associates—as I think, wrongly—the Babylonian rite with general temple-prostitution, he adds a third suggestion, prompted by his theory of kingship: the king himself might have to mate with one or more of the temple-harlots “who played Astarte to his Adonis”:[277.4] such unions might serve to maintain the supply of human deities, one of whom might succeed to the throne, and another might be sacrificed in his father’s stead when religion demanded the life of the royal man-god. I do not find this theory coherent even with itself; and, like the others, it fails to explain all the facts, and, on the other hand, it imagines data which are not given us by the records.
That state of communism when sexual union was entirely promiscuous is receding further and further into the anthropological background: it is dangerous to predicate it of the most backward Anatolian State in any period which can come into our ken. When the Byzantine Sokrates gravely tells us that the men of Heliopolis had their wives in common, he does not know what he is saying. And if this sacrifice of virginity before marriage was a recognition of the original rights of all the males of the community, why did not some representative of the community take the virginity, the priest or some head-man? This ill-considered sociologic hypothesis shipwrecks on that mysterious stranger.[278.1]
Prof. Westermarck, in his Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas,[278.2] regards the Mylitta-rite as intended to ensure fertility in women through direct appeal to the goddess of fertility, and he explains the formula which the stranger uttered—ἐπικαλέω τοι τὴν θεὸν Μύλιττα—as signifying generally “May the goddess Mylitta prosper thee.” Obviously the phrase, “I invoke the goddess for thee,” could as naturally mean, “I claim thee in the name of the goddess,” the stranger basing his right to the woman on this appeal. But his general theory appears not so unsound as those which have just been noted.
The comparative method ought to help us here; and though we have no exact parallel, as far as I am aware, recorded of any people outside the Mediterranean area to the Babylonian custom, we find usages reported elsewhere that agree with it in one essential. Lubbock quotes instances from modern India of the rule imposed upon women of presenting themselves before marriage in the temple of Juggernaut for the purpose—as he implies—of offering up their virginity, though no such custom is recorded in the Vedic period of religion;[278.3] cases also are chronicled of the rule prevailing among uncultured or semi-cultured tribes that the medicine-man or the priest should take the virginity of the bride before the marriage ceremony.[279.1] These are probably illustrations of the working of the same idea as that which inspired the Babylonian custom. Marriage involves the entering upon a new state; change of life is generally dangerous, and must be safeguarded by what Van Gennep has called “rites de passage”; more especially is the sexual union with a virgin dangerous and liable to be regarded with awe by primitive sentiment; before it is safe to marry her, the tabu that is upon her must first be removed by a religious act securing the divinity’s sanction for the removal; just as the ripe cornfield must not be reaped before religious rites, such as the consecration of first-fruits, have loosened the tabu upon it: we may believe that Hellenic marriage ritual secured the same end as the Babylonian by what seems to us the more innocent method of offering the προτέλεια. So the Babylonian safeguards the coming marriage by offering the first-fruits of his daughter to the goddess who presides over the powers and processes of life and birth. Under her protection, after appeal to her, the process loses its special danger; or if there is danger still, it falls upon the head of the stranger.[279.2] For I can find no other way of accounting for his presence as a necessary agent, in the ritual of at least four widely separate communities of Semitic race: this comparative ubiquity prevents us explaining it as due to some capricious accidental impulse of delicacy, as if the act would become less indelicate if a stranger who would not continue in the place participated in it.
In his essay on the question, Mr. Hartland explains the Babylonian rite as belonging to the class of puberty-ceremonies; nor would this account of it conflict with the view here put forth, if, as he maintains, primitive puberty-ceremonies to which girls are subjected are usually preliminary to the marriage which speedily follows.[280.1] But puberty-ceremonies are generally performed at initiation-mysteries, and none of the rites that we are considering appear to have been associated with mysteries except, perhaps, at Cyprus, where the late record speaks of mysteries instituted by Kinyras that had a sexual significance, and which may have been the occasion of the consecration of virginity that Justin describes;[280.2] but the institution of mysteries has not yet been proved for any purely Semitic religion. In any case, Mr. Hartland’s statement does not explain why the loss of virginity should be considered desirable in a puberty-ceremony or as a preliminary to marriage.
The significance of the action, as I have interpreted it, is negative rather than positive, the avoidance of a vague peril or the removal of a tabu rather than the attainment of the blessing of fertility, as Dr. Westermarck would regard it. And this idea, the removal of a tabu, seems expressed in the phrase of Herodotus[281.1] by which he describes the state of the woman after the ceremony—ἀποσιωσαμένη τῇ θεῷ; and the parallel that I have suggested, the consecration of the first-fruits of the harvest to remove the tabu from the rest of the crop, is somewhat justified by the words of Justin already quoted—“pro reliqua pudicitia libamenta Veneri soluturas.”
As regards the other institution, the maintenance of “hierodoulai” in temples as “consecrated” women, “kadeschim,” unmarried, who for a period of years indulged in sexual intercourse with visitors, the original intention and significance of it is hard to decide. We may be sure that it did not originate in mere profligacy, and the inscription of Tralles shows that even in the later Roman period it had not lost its religious prestige.[281.2] Such a custom could naturally arise in a society that allowed freedom of sexual intercourse among young unmarried persons—and this is not uncommonly found at a primitive level of culture—and that was devoted to the worship of a goddess of sexual fertility. The rituals in the temples of Ishtar of Erech, Anaitis of Armenia, Mā of Comana, must have been instituted for some national and social purpose; therefore Mr. Hartland’s suggestion, that the original object of the Armenian rite was to give the maidens a chance of securing themselves a suitable husband by experience, seems insufficient. Dr. Frazer’s theory, that connects the institution with some of the mystic purposes of kingship,[282.1] floats in the air; for there is not a particle of evidence showing any relation between these women and the monarch or the royal harem or the monarchical succession or the death of a royal victim. A simpler suggestion is that the “hierodoulai,” or temple-women, were the human vehicles for diffusing through the community the peculiar virtue or potency of the goddess, the much-coveted blessing of human fertility. Thus to consecrate slaves or even daughters to this service was a pious social act.
The significance of the facts that we have been examining is of the highest for the history of religious morality, especially for the varied history of the idea of purity. We call this temple-harlotry vile and impure; the civilised Babylonian, who in private life valued purity and morality, called the women “kadistu,” that is, “pure” or clean in the ritualistic sense, or as Zimmern interprets the ideogram, “not unclean.”[282.2] In fact, the Mediterranean old-world religions, all save the Hebraic, agreed in regarding the processes of the propagation of life as divine, at least as something not alien or abhorrent to godhead. But the early Christian propagandists, working here on Hebraic lines, intensified the isolation of God from the simple phenomena of birth, thereby engendering at times an anti-sexual bias, and preparing a discord between any possible biological view and the current religious dogma, and modern ethical thought has not been wholly a gainer thereby.