CHAPTER XVI SACRAL HARLOTRY. CHILD SACRIFICE Men's clubhouses. Consecrated women. Relation of sacral harlotry and child sacrifice.. Reproduction and food supply.— The Gilgamesh epic. -The Adonis myth. - Religious ritual, religious drama, and harlotry. The Babylonian custom; its relation to religion. - Religion and the mores. - Cases of sacral harlotry. The same customs in the Old Testament. The antagonism of abundance and excess. Survivals of sacral harlotry; analogous customs in Hindostan. — Lingam and yoni. - Conventionalization. Criticism of the mores of Hindostan. Mexican mores; drunkenness. - Japanese mores. — Chinese religion and mores. Philosophy of the interest in reproduction; incest.- The archaic is sacred. — Child sacrifice. Beast sacrifice substituted for child sacrifice. - Mexican doctrine of greater power through death. Motives of child sacrifice. - Dedication by vows. - Degeneration of the custom of consecrating women. tions come from Israel. How the Jewish view of sensuality prevailed. Our tradi The topics treated in this chapter are further illustrations of the power of the mores to make anything right, and to protect anything from condemnation. See also Chapter XVII. 585. Men's clubhouses. It is a very common custom in barbaric society that the men have a clubhouse in which they spend much of their time together and in which the unmarried men sleep. Such houses are centers of intrigue, enterprise, amusement, and vice. The men work there, carry on shamanistic rites, hold dances, entertain guests, and listen to narratives by the elders. Women are excluded altogether or at times. In the Caroline Islands such houses are institutions of social and religious importance. While the women of the place may not enter them, those from a neighboring place live in them for a time in license, but return home with payment which is used partly for religious purposes and partly for themselves.1 1 Snouck-Hurgronje, De Atjehers, I, 64-66; Bur. Eth., XVIII, 285; Amer. Anthrop., XI, 56; Codrington, Melanesians, 102, 299; Serpa Pinto, Como eu Atravassei Africa, I, 82; Kubary, Karolinenarchipel., 47, 226, 244; Powers, Calif. Indians, 24. 586. Consecrated women. It may even be said to be the current view of uncivilized peoples, up to the full development of the father family, that women have free control of their own persons until they are married, when they pass under a taboo which they are bound to observe. Therefore before marriage they may accumulate a dowry. Very many cases also occur of men-women and women-men, persons of either sex who assume the functions and mode of life of the other. Cases also occur in barbarism of women consecrated to the gods. Among the Ewe-speaking peoples of West Africa1 girls of ten or twelve are received and educated for three years in the chants and dances of worship, serving the priests. At the end of the time they become public women, but are under no reproach, because they are regarded as married to the god and acting under his direction. Properly they should be restricted to the worshipers at the temple, but they are not. Probably such was the original taboo which is now relaxed and decayed. Children whom such. women bear belong to the god. The institution "is essentially religious in its origin and is intimately connected with phallic worship." 587. Sacral harlotry and child sacrifice. These observations may serve to introduce a study of the phenomena, so incomprehensible to us, of sacral prostitution and child sacrifice. That study is calculated to show us that the mores define right and wrong. It would be a great mistake to regard the above cases as mete aberrations of sex appetite. The usages had their origin in interests. Sacral harlotry was a substitute for the child sacrifice of females. The other incidental interests found advantage in it. It was an attempt to solve problems of life. It was regarded as conducive to welfare, and was connected with religion. It was kept up by the conservatism and pertinacity of religious usage until a later time and another set of conditions, when it became vicious. 588. Reproduction and food supply. The operations of nature by which plants and animals reproduce are of great interest and importance to man, because on them depends the abundance of 1 Ellis, Ewe-speaking Peoples, 141. his food supply. It is impossible to tell when this interest would "begin," but it would become intense whenever the number of men was great in proportion to the food supply. Hence the rainfall, the course of the seasons, the prevalence of winds, the conjunction of astronomical phenomena with spawning or fruit seasons, and the habits of plants and animals caught the feeble attention of savage man and taught him facts of nature, through his eagerness to get signs of coming plenty or suggestions as to his own plans and efforts. Attention has been called to a very interesting fact about the fructification of the domesticated date palm wherever oasis cultivation prevailed in western Asia.1 The fructification must be artificial. Men carry the pollen to the female plant and adopt devices to distribute it on the wind or by artificial contact. At the present time this is done by attaching a bunch of the male seed on a branch to windward.2 Tylor first suggested that certain ancient pictorial representations are meant to depict the work of artificial fructification as carried on by mythological persons, - cherubim, who represent the winds.3 The function of the wind distributing the seed is divine work. The tree is of such supreme value that the well living of men depends on this operation. The sex conjunction therefore was the most important and beneficent operation in nature, and correct knowledge of it was the prime condition of getting an abundant food supply. Man followed the operation with all the interest of the food supply and all the awe of religion. It is certain that his interest in it was "innocent." He began to mythologize about it on account of the grand elements of welfare, risk, and skill which were in it. A parallel case is furnished by the treatment accorded to rice by the Javanese. It is to them the great article of food supply. They endow it with a soul and ascribe to it sex passion. They have ceremonies by which to awaken this passion in the rice as a means of increasing their own food supply. The ceremonies consist in sympathetic magic by men and women at night.5 1 Barton, Semitic Ôrigins, 78. 2 Wellsted, Arabia, II, 12. Proc. Soc. Bibl. Archeol., 1890, XII, 383. 4 Herodotus, I, 193. 5 Wilken, Volkenkunde, 550. 589. The Gilgamesh epic. The Gilgamesh epic which originated in the Euphrates valley more than 2000 years B.C.1 consists of a number of episodes which were later collected and coördinated into a single work like other great epics. Jastrow 2 construes it as a variation of the story of Adam and Eve. Gilgamesh is a hero admired by all women. The elders of Uruk beg his mother, the mother-goddess Aruru (a form of Ishtar), to restrain him. In order to comply she makes of clay Eabani, a satyr-like, hairy wild man, with a tail and horns, who lives with the beasts. Jastrow thinks that this means that he consorted with female beasts, having as yet no female of his own species. No one could capture him, so the god Shamash assailed him by lust, sending to him a priestess of Ishtar who won him to herself (woman) away from beasts. She said to him: "Thou shalt be like a god. Why dost thou lie with beasts?" "She revealed his soul to Eabani." She was, therefore, a culture heroine, and the myth means that, with the knowledge of sex, awoke consciousness, intelligence, and civilization. Eabani followed the priestess to Uruk, where he and Gilgamesh became comrades, heroes of war and slayers of monsters. Ishtar fell in love with Gilgamesh, but he refused her because all men and beasts whom she loved she reduced to misery. Her vengeance for this rejection brings woe and death on the two friends. The Mexicans had a similar myth that the sun god and the maize goddess produced life in vegetation by their sex activity. The sun god contracted venereal disease so that they probably connected syphilis with sexual excess. In the worship of Ishtar at Uruk there were three grades of harlot priestesses, and there the temple consecration of women was practiced in recognition of the connection between the service of Ishtar and civilization. At first the goddesses of life and of love were the same. The Venus of reproduction and the Venus of carnal lust were later distinguished. At some periods the distinction was sharply maintained. At other times the former Venus was only an 1 Maspero, Peuples de l'Orient, I, 576, 589. intermediary to lead to the latter. The Mexicans had two goddesses, one of chaste, the other of impure, love. The festivals of the former were celebrated with obscene rites; those of the latter with the self-immolation of harlots, with excessive language and acts. The goddess was thought to be rejuvenated by the death of the harlots. The obscene rites were at war with the current mores of the people at the time. The demons of license became the guardians of good morals. They concealed the phallus. Sins of license were confessed to the gods of license.1 Teteoinnan, the maize-mother, also became a harlot through the work of furthering growth, but in the service of the state she punished transgressions of the sex taboo.2 This is as if the need of the taboo having been learned by the consequences of license and excess, the goddess of the latter became the guardian of the former. In the Semitic religions the beginning and end of life were attributed to supernatural agencies dangerous to man.3 The usages to be mentioned below show that this was not an abstract dogma, but was accepted as the direct teaching of experience. 590. The Adonis myth. There was in the worship of Ishtar wailing for Tammuz (Adonis). He was either the son or the husband of Ishtar. She went to Hades to rescue him. His death was a myth for the decay of vegetation, and his resurrection was a myth for its revival. The former was celebrated with lamentations; the latter with extravagant rejoicings and sex license. This legend, which under local modifications and much syncretism existed until long after Christianity was introduced in the Greco-Roman world, coincides with the laws of Hammurabi as to harlot priestesses. 591. Sacral harlotry. Three things which later reached strong independent development are here united, — religious ritual, religious drama (with symbols, pantomime, and mysteries which later came to be considered indecent), and harlotry. Sacral harlotry was the only harlotry. It was normal and was not a subject of ethical misgiving. It was a part of the religious and 1 Archiv f. Anthrop., XXIX, 150. 3 W. R. Smith, Relig. of the Semites, 447. 2 Ibid., 183. 4 Lucian, De Syria Dea, 6. |