Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity

Budin, Stephanie Lynn. The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity - Ingram Academic. Cheltenham, Glos, UK: Cambridge University Pres, 2009.

9780521178044;

In this study, Stephanie Budin demonstrates that the practice of sacred prostitution, the sale of a person's body for sex in which some or all of the money earned was devoted to a deity or a temple, was a result of more than 2,000 years of misinterpretations, false assumptions, and faulty scholarship.  Budin shows that sacred prostitution simply did not exist in the ancient world.  The evidence from the ancient Near East, the Greco-Roman texts, and the Early Christian authors don't mention the practice and fail to support the concept.  Furthermore, Budin shows that the majority of sources that have traditionally been understood as pertaining to sacred prostitution actually have nothing to do with that practice and have been largely mis-interpreted.  She shows further that the few texts that are usually invoked on this subject are, moreover, terribly misunderstood.  And last, contrary to many current hypotheses, the creation of the myth of sacred prostitution has nothing to do with notions of accusation or the construction of a decadent "Other."  This is a concretely argued, scholarly study of ancient Near East religion that seeks to more fully understand religion as it was and not how moderns would have liked it to have been.  In other words, it is a historiographical reckoning.

Stephanie Lynn Budin (Ph.D., Univ. of Pennsylvania) is an independent scholar who publishes on women, sexuality, and religion in the ancient eastern Mediterranean and has written or co-edited eight books. 

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