Even if you have heard about the sacred prostitution, you lack in complete knowledge attached to this term. Well, sacred prostitution is also known by the name, religious prostitution or temple prostitution. Have a look at some rare facts about the sacred prostitution.
1. Religious prostitution is a sexual ritual that consists of sexual intercourse or other sexual activity performed in the context of religious worship and sometimes performed as form of fertility rite and divine marriage
2. Some scholars prefer the term “sacred sex” to sacred prostitution, in cases where a payment for services was not involved.
3. The Greek term hierodoulos or “hierodule” has sometimes been taken to mean “sacred prostitute”, whereas Hebrew term qedesha is often translated as “temple prostitute”.
4. Scholars generally believe that a form of “sacred marriage” ritual or hieros gamos was staged between the king of a Sumerian city-state and the High Priestess of Inanna, the Sumerian goddess of sexual love, fertility, and warfare, but no certain evidence has survived to prove that sexual intercourse was included.
5. In Hammurabi’s code of laws, the rights and good name of female sacred prostitutes were protected.
6. The Hebrew Bible uses two different words for prostitute, zonah and kedeshah (or qedesha). The word zonah simply meant an ordinary prostitute or “loose woman” and the word kedeshah literally means “consecrated”
7. In some parts of ancient India, women competed to win the title of Nagarvadhu or “bride of the city.” The most beautiful woman was chosen and was respected as a goddess. She served as a courtesan, and the price for a single night’s dance was very high, within reach only for the king, the princes and the lords.
8.Maithuna refers to male-female couples and their union in the physical, sexual sense and is synonymous with kriya nishpatti translated as mature cleansing.
9. In Southern India & eastern Indian state of Odisha, devadasi is the practice of hierodulic prostitution, with similar customary forms such as basavi, and involves dedicating young adolescent girls from villages in a ritual marriage to a deity or basically temple, who then work in the temple and function as spiritual guides, dancers, and prostitutes servicing male devotees in the temple.
Sacred prostitution was a serious issue in India and still it stays in shadow. People are not known to scared prostitution, but still then it was practiced on daily basis.