Sacred prostitution

Sacred prostitution, temple prostitution, cult prostitution, and religious prostitution are general terms for a sexual ritual consisting of sexual intercourse or other sexual activity performed in the context of religious worship, perhaps as a form of fertility rite or divine marriage (hieros gamos). Some scholars prefer the term sacred sex to sacred prostitution in cases where payment for services was not involved.

Through the twentieth century, scholars considered such practices to be customary in the ancient world. Over the last 30 years, historical evidence for these practices in the Ancient Near East and Greco-Roman antiquity has increasingly been called into question. Robert A. Oden, Stephanie Lynn Budin and others, have questioned whether sacred prostitution, as an institution whereby women and men sold sex for the profit of deities and temples, existed at all in the Ancient Near East and Greco-Roman antiquity. Assante argues that the earlier view of temple prostitution is more a construct of the 19th-century Western European mindset than a historical fact.

Ancient Near Eastern societies along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers featured many shrines and temples or houses of heaven dedicated to various deities. The 5th-century BC historian Herodotus's account and some other testimony from the Hellenistic Period and Late Antiquity suggest that ancient societies encouraged the practice of sacred sexual rites not only in Babylonia and Cyprus, but throughout the Near East.

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