Ritual sex
Feb. 17th, 2007 11:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ikhet_sekhmetI wrote the following unpublished letter to On the Issues in 1997, responding to an article on the Goddess movement which contained a number of striking inaccuracies (human sacrifice in Ancient Egypt?!).
For me, the most interesting point is the confusion between ritual sex and commercial sex, which crops up everywhere, partly due to confusing terms like "sacred prostitution". I'm just reading an article from Signs about this very point, which reminded me that I wanted to repost the letter, which originally appeared on my now defunct feminist Web site, along with my references.
Writing in On the Issues 6(3) (summer 1997), Judith Antonelli attacks the idea of an ancient, utopian matriarchy. While it's true that claims of a golden age for women need to be very carefully examined, Antonelli's article contains some "fairy tales" of its own.
Antonelli claims that, according to The Golden Bough, young women were sacrificed to the Egyptian goddess Isis by drowning in the Nile. In fact, James Frazer is discussing the "marriage" of women to male water gods - including the permanent "marriage" of human sacrifice. "When the Arabs conquered Egypt," he writes, "they learned that at the annual rise of the Nile the Egyptians were wont to deck a young virgin in gay apparel and throw her into the river as a sacrifice, in order to obtain a plentiful inundantion. The Arab general abolished the barbarous custom."
That was in the Seventh Century AD - long after the Ancient Egyptians, who did not practice human sacrifice. Frazer makes no mention of Isis in connection with this practice.
Moreover, the women enslaved by Mesopotamian temples as prostitutes were no more "priestesses" than the men enslaved as field workers or bricklayers were "priests". Antonelli is confusing "ritual prostitution" - religious rituals which included sex - with commercial prostitution.
Antonelli has also mangled Herodotus' claim that all Babylonian women were required to visit the temple of Ishtar once in their lives, and have sex with a stranger. (This accuracy of this story, for which there is no evidence in the Mesopotamian sources, is still under dispute). In Antonelli's version, the priestess herself has become a sex slave.
These ancient civilisations teach us two things: firstly, that the fact that a society worships a goddess or goddesses is no guarantee that women will be worshipped, or even accorded equal rights. And secondly, that women's inequality is neither universal nor inevitable; women in Ancient Egypt arguably had more rights than women in the Victorian era.
__
Frazer, Sir James George. The Golden Bough (Part I, Volume ii, page 151.) Macmillian, London, 1911.
Stol, Marten. Private life in Ancient Mesopotamia. in Civilizations of the Ancient Near East (Volume I). Jack M. Sasson, editor. Simon and Schuster Macmillian, New York, 1995.
(Also see On the Issues readers' feedback to Antonelli's article. Starhawk's response, in an unpublished letter to Utne Reader, used to be online, but I can no longer find it.)
For me, the most interesting point is the confusion between ritual sex and commercial sex, which crops up everywhere, partly due to confusing terms like "sacred prostitution". I'm just reading an article from Signs about this very point, which reminded me that I wanted to repost the letter, which originally appeared on my now defunct feminist Web site, along with my references.
Writing in On the Issues 6(3) (summer 1997), Judith Antonelli attacks the idea of an ancient, utopian matriarchy. While it's true that claims of a golden age for women need to be very carefully examined, Antonelli's article contains some "fairy tales" of its own.
Antonelli claims that, according to The Golden Bough, young women were sacrificed to the Egyptian goddess Isis by drowning in the Nile. In fact, James Frazer is discussing the "marriage" of women to male water gods - including the permanent "marriage" of human sacrifice. "When the Arabs conquered Egypt," he writes, "they learned that at the annual rise of the Nile the Egyptians were wont to deck a young virgin in gay apparel and throw her into the river as a sacrifice, in order to obtain a plentiful inundantion. The Arab general abolished the barbarous custom."
That was in the Seventh Century AD - long after the Ancient Egyptians, who did not practice human sacrifice. Frazer makes no mention of Isis in connection with this practice.
Moreover, the women enslaved by Mesopotamian temples as prostitutes were no more "priestesses" than the men enslaved as field workers or bricklayers were "priests". Antonelli is confusing "ritual prostitution" - religious rituals which included sex - with commercial prostitution.
Antonelli has also mangled Herodotus' claim that all Babylonian women were required to visit the temple of Ishtar once in their lives, and have sex with a stranger. (This accuracy of this story, for which there is no evidence in the Mesopotamian sources, is still under dispute). In Antonelli's version, the priestess herself has become a sex slave.
These ancient civilisations teach us two things: firstly, that the fact that a society worships a goddess or goddesses is no guarantee that women will be worshipped, or even accorded equal rights. And secondly, that women's inequality is neither universal nor inevitable; women in Ancient Egypt arguably had more rights than women in the Victorian era.
__
Frazer, Sir James George. The Golden Bough (Part I, Volume ii, page 151.) Macmillian, London, 1911.
Stol, Marten. Private life in Ancient Mesopotamia. in Civilizations of the Ancient Near East (Volume I). Jack M. Sasson, editor. Simon and Schuster Macmillian, New York, 1995.
(Also see On the Issues readers' feedback to Antonelli's article. Starhawk's response, in an unpublished letter to Utne Reader, used to be online, but I can no longer find it.)
