Sunday, January 13, 2013

The Temple and the Bed

I've been wrestling a bit with notions of sacred sexuality recently.  Part of that is part and parcel of having grown up raised by a Catholic, even if the greater part of my own religious education was Protestant; the notion that there is something sacramental to, if not marriage, then the various things it's bundled with in the eyes of the church, not least of them sex and reproduction, is tenacious.  Since the latter is pretty much off the table for me on this turn of the great wheel, sex it is, then.

Unfortunately, there's a lot of difference of opinion on whether sacred sex was part of common practice in the Near East in the pre-Christian era.  I'm reasonably comfortable with the idea that it was part of esoteric and magickal practice in that time and place, mostly because it ends up being part of at least one group's esoteric teachings in pretty much every culture, largely because it works.  But in many times and places it's been esoteric precisely because it's perceived as problematic, if not perverted, by the culture at large.  It's not clear whether the Mesopotamian-Levantine cultures were more open about it or not, mostly because there's not a whole lot of direct evidence.  We know that there was prostitution, and that not all prostitutes were lower-class.  We know that some temples had priestesses in many different positions, some artistic, some administrative, and some ritual.  And there are hints and suggestions in the surviving artwork that some rituals required male and female nudity, or at least exposure of the penis and/or breasts.  As far as hard evidence goes, that's about it.

Purity codes were a big thing in the region at the time.  The Hebrew Bible is full of them, occasionally conflicting.  And the Hebrew purity codes take a hard line against a large number of sexual acts, although not prostitution per se.  In many cases, the justification isn't so much "the Lord thinks this is gross" as it is "this is what the other people do, and you're not them, so don't".  There has been a great deal of ink spilled over the idea that this is code for "these acts are sacred to other gods, and you're not theirs, so don't".  I admit, the idea is in some ways appealing - perhaps Yahveh hates Teh Buttsecks, but Ba'al, Asherah, and Astarte are very much in favor of it.  Unfortunately, the documentation left by those other nations is incomplete, and does not tell us whether this is so, or whether they had their own purity codes in which they said not to do those same acts for other reasons.

On the other hand, the Greeks seemed to think that there was actual temple prostitution going on in Assyria/Babylon.  At least, their travelogues state outright that there was.  They don't seem to think much of it, but then, the Greeks never seemed to think much of traditions that differed from their own, and they exoticized other cultures pretty much the same way we do.  So, even if they terribly misinterpreted what was going on, there seems to be some sort of officially sanctioned sex going on on temple grounds at least somewhere in the region.  But once again, those who were actually participating in it, who understood the rules and the rationale, didn't leave records of their own.  So we basically have two fairly prudish sets of literate people, with their own agendas against the practitioners, accusing the Levanto-Mesopotamian peoples of inappropriate religious sex.

The Ba'al saga doesn't have much to say on the matter, except for some weird tension between Ba'al and Asherah that causes problems in the translation.  Asherah is mentioned holding an object - most translations say "spindle" - that Ba'al later has a very bad reaction to when it appears on his banquet table.  It is unclear why, but Ba'al's reaction suggests that the object has sexual connotations of some sort.  In two of her other appearances in the preserved stories, Asherah's appearance before El causes him to immediately start talking about sex, including a few dirty jokes, but then again, they're married.  Still, in the sparse material we have, Asherah does seem to have an immediate association with some sort of sexuality; it isn't a stretch to suggest that there might have been at least symbolic sexual rites in her temples.  The same is loosely true of Astarte, Ishtar, and Inanna in their respective stories, and perhaps Cybele and Atargatis as well.

At any rate, sacred sexuality doesn't have to be part of the exoteric rites for modern Pagans to add it to their own practices.  It's more that it would be nice to know what was done before so that we can adapt it, rather than trying to come up with something from what we now have; a lot of what we've got borrows heavily from Hindu and Taoist practices, and if one is going to go around appropriating peoples' culture, better it be ones your own culture didn't oppress (by virtue of their having been long gone).

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