Beyond Prostitution: The Sexual Priestess As

Priestess
I worship the goddesses of love, Qadesh, Asherah, Aphrodite, Inanna, Ishtar. I worship
them with my body, lying with my lovers, male lovers, more than one lover. I do not call
what I do sacred prostitution. "Sexual priestess" and "prostitute" are not synonymous
terms.
It was Deena Metzger, I think, who started the whole prostitute thing off. (Mind you, I
did my increment to popularize the idea by choosing the Greek word hetaera, prostitute,
to describe sex magicians, but fortunately the term never caught on.) (Williams, 1990).
Metzgar's romantic view of ancient history proved to be wildly popular. "Once upon a
time, in Sumeria, Mesopotamia, in Egypt, and in Greece, there where no whorehouses,
no brothels. In that time, in those countries, there were instead the Temples of the Sacred
Prostitutes." (Metzgar, 1985)
Let's take a brief tour of the ancient world. In Babylonia massive temples housed living
statues of various deities, male and female. Priests and priestesses attended the deities,
feeding, bathing, clothing them. One class of priestesses, kadistum or qadistum, served
as temple prostitutes and wet-nurses. Once a year there was a ceremony enacting the
marriage of the king to the goddess Inanna, with a priestess of Inanna taking the part of
the Goddess.
In Greece, any woman having intercourse with a man not her husband might be called a
a high-class prostitute, "companion to men". They owned and managed property which
their children inherited, in sharp contrast to women in families, whose property was
owned and managed by their husbands and male relatives. Other less fortunate
prostitutes were slaves. Some were able to keep a portion of their earnings and buy back
their freedom. In Hellenistic times women, especially young women, could be
kidnapped into slavery. These women were sometimes sold to temples of Aphrodite,
such as the one at the port of Corinth servicing incoming sailors, or one of the temples to
Astarte in Syria. Then the temple owned the slave and gathered the profits she made.
In Judah and Israel women worshipped the goddesses Asherah and Astarte under trees
and by baking cakes in their image. These priestesses could be called qedeshim or zonah
or almah. Any holy person might be called a qedeshoth, and Qedesh, holy, is one of
Asherah's titles. A goddess Qadesh turns up in Egypt, an apparent import from the Near
East. The Old Testament patriarchs condemned the qedeshim and zonah as prostitutes.
Zonah could mean, again, any woman who had intercourse with someone other than her
husband. The patriarchs were fond of the phrase that Israel went whoring after false
gods--that is, goddesses. Scholars for decades took this to mean literally that Israel's men
visited whores under the trees. Newer scholarship leans toward the idea that the
patriarchs were condemning any alternate religious and spiritual practices.
Returning to Metzgar for a moment, she says: "in the days of the Quedishtu every
woman served the divine as Holy Prostitute, often for as long as a year." This is a report
the Greek historian Herodotus made about the Babylonians, and he believed any
fabulous story he was told.
Metzgar asserts that temple prostitutes provided a doorway to the divine and softened
the natural aggression of men. There's a lot of male aggression around today. She
concludes, "And so women must all become Holy Prostitutes again."
My reading of the history does not reveal that prostitutes, temple or freelance, in the
ancient world were all that terribly altruistic. The point wasn't to soften men or save
them from their warlike natures or reveal to them an aspect of the Divine Feminine. The
point was to make money.
However, the Path of the Holy Prostitute has become quite a popular one. Pat Califia
(arguably the funniest and strongest writer of and about erotica of our time) notes,
"There are a goodly number of pagan women (and a handful of gay men and Third
Gender souls) who identify themselves as Qadesh or sacred harlots..."
With some relish she takes a pin to the balloon of romanticism of the Servant Of the
Goddess Just As In Ancient Times: "...sometimes it seems to me that a woman who
embraces the status of Qadesh opens herself to at least as much abuse as she does divine
energy....When a woman (priestess or no) sexually services a man, his libido and
genitalia become devotional objects. There is very little hope of shifting the balance of
power between the sexes or manifesting yonic divinity in that scenario."
Califia goes on: "At any rate, economic issues, issues of payment, reciprocity, penalties,
and freedom, cannot be separated from any sexual interaction or transaction." (Califia,
1997)
It's a great thought, but I think it's unfinished. Or maybe we're going to have a
disagreement about the word "economic" here. Issues of payment are economic issues.
Penalties and freedom are cultural issues. Reciprocity is not an economic issue, it is a
magical, energic, emotional issue. Not every sexual interaction is a transaction. That's
the slope that takes you to "so we must all become sacred prostitutes". If every sexual
interaction is economic, then every woman is a prostitute. I object. Aside from the loss
to English of the meaning of a perfectly useful word, this approach seems to me to buy
into the patriarch's ancient definitions.
None of these cultures, please note, was exactly egalitarian. Prostitutes in Greece and
priestesses in Babylonia might hold property and exercise more physical freedom than
women in family structures, but they also were frequently denied the right to make
choices about their lives. The Jewish patriarchs condemned women who chose what
they did with their bodies. Greek and Babylonian patriarchs weren't any more supportive
of women's choices than the Jewish patriarchs just because they were what we now call
Pagan. They were all pretty much condemning, not the sex, but women's freedom.
In Greece a woman not married and also sexually active was by definition available to
all men. Individual hetaera did choose their customers, but the point of the category was
that if she didn't belong to one man she belonged to all. The temple prostitutes belonged
to the temple. There wasn't a choice "belongs to no man." The Jewish patriarchs were
looking at women freer than their own and saying: their freedom means that they are not
owned by one man, they are owned by all men.
Califia says: "In late 20th century industrial Western societies, as in many other cultures,
any woman who tries to control her own sexuality and enjoy it runs the risk of being
called a slut and a whore." Calling a woman "prostitute" continues to be a successful
way of exerting control over her free and threatening sexuality by redefining it, not as
her own, but as the property of all men, held in common. This is why I object to
levelling the distinction between types of power exchange involved in sacred sex by
calling it all prostitution. This doesn't reclaim the sacredness of sex, it perpetuates the
millenia old definition of freely sexual women as available to all men. Any woman who
strays too far from good girl behaviors stands in danger of being called a whore. Being
called a whore means loss of status, means dirty, means lowest of the heap. Being called
a whore also means fair game. You can't rape a whore--she's available to all men, by
definition.
Defining prostitution as a religious activity is a good move in the direction of claiming
back the power to define our sexuality. It's fun how the words "sacred" and "whore"
together shock. Sacred whore. The phrase starts to break up the complex of shame
around prostitution, it silences name calling, it makes no sense at all to those who deny
their bodies and hate pleasure. A sacred prostitute is not a woman who belongs to all
men--she is a woman who belongs to the goddess.
On the other hand, isn't this pretty much an internal experience? That is, how is the self-
perception "I am sacred" getting transmitted from the whore to the customer? The
trouble is that men in our culture are not trained to respect goddesses. They're not paying
to be enlightened, they're paying to come. I suppose you could limit your clientele to
Pagan men, but most of them don't make all that much...
I want to draw attention to something fairly simple: what's happening with the energy?
Metzgar's right about the serious aggression problem we have. The prostitute will take a
hit of anger laden energy, how is she getting clean afterwards? Don't we need to at least
ask these questions before we advocate prostitution as a spiritual path?
Saying "we must all become prostitutes" perpetuates the notion that women owe men
something. Their limitless sexual energy. Healing. A cure for aggression. It escapes me
what we get by buying into this. A sense of being limitless resources? I have another
sense--that my life is precious. My energy and body and time and love are finite and
gifts owed to no one.
Every sexual act involves an exchange. Becoming conscious of the exchange allows the
priestess to channel it. For the prostitute the exchange contract trades money for sexual
service, but that is not the only kind of exchange that can exist; other contracts involve
pleasure, energy, and emotion.
I think it's time to take the power to define the basis on which we will engage in sexual
exchanges of ANY kind, based on the radical concept that we own our bodies and our
energy, and that we are owed respect as a matter of course.
Sexual Priestess Manifesto
I choose every touch at every moment.
I can say no. I can stop at any time.
All parties must agree to all activities, including energy movement.
All parties must benefit equally from the exchange.
Personally, I don't find the ideas "male energy" or "female energy" or "sexual energy"
useful at all. Men and women are shapes human bodies come in. Sex isn't an energy, it's
a process, a way to channel energy through the body.
A sexual priestess needs the physical skills involved in making love well; understands
how to move energy in her own body and her partner's; exchanges emotional energy;
fluidly induces states of consciousness in herself and her partner.
As a priestess I may play many roles with my partners, including that of prostitute, but I
demand an underlying respect for myself and for the goddess to whom I am dedicating
the endeavor. These days mostly Aphrodite. The word I use for myself isn't qadistu, or
hetaera, or zonah; the word I use for myself is lover.
References:
Califia, Pat: "The Dominant Woman as Priestess and Sacred Whore", in Bitch Goddess:
The Spiritual Path of the Dominant Woman, Pat Califia and Drew Campbell, editors,
Greenery Press 1997
Metzger, Deena: "Re-Vamping the World: On the Return of the Holy Prostitute," Utne
Reader, 1985
Williams, Brandy: Ecstatic Ritual: Practical Sex Magic, Prism Press, 1990
copyright 1999 Brandy Williams