Stephanie Budin demonstrates that sacred prostitution, the sale of a person's body for sex in which some or all of the money earned was devoted to a deity or a temple, did not exist in the ancient world. Reconsidering the evidence from the ancient Near East, the Greco-Roman texts, and the early Christian authors, Budin shows that the majority of sources that have traditionally been understood as pertaining to sacred prostitution actually have nothing to do with this institution. The few texts that are usually invoked on this subject are, moreover, terribly misunderstood. Contrary to many current hypotheses, the creation of the myth of sacred prostitution has nothing to do with notions of accusation or the construction of a decadent, Oriental 'Other'. Instead, the myth has come into being as a result of more than 2,000 years of misinterpretations, false assumptions, and faulty methodology.

Scholars have long recognized a one-to-one correspondence, or interpretatio syncretism, between the Greek goddess Aphrodite and the Phoenician goddess Ashtart (Astarte). The origin of this syncretism is usually attributed to the eastern origins of Aphrodite herself, whereby the Greek goddess evolved out of the Phoenician, as is suggested as early as the writings of Herodotos. In contrast to this understanding, I argue here that the perceived syncretism actually emerged differently on the island of Cyprus than throughout the rest of the Mediterranean. On Cyprus, the syncretism emerged out of an identification between the two queen goddesses of Cyprus - Aphrodite and Ashtart. In Greece, by contrast, it evolved out of a slow "Orientalizing" of Aphrodite combined with a Greek tendency to equate almost all eastern goddesses. As a result, the identification between Aphrodite and Ashtart was quite general, and both goddesses were syncretized not only with each other, but with a full range of Mediterranean goddesses.

No abstract

In the modern west, reproductive fertility is a women's issue. The critical processes of conception, pregnancy and parturition all involve women far more than men. The debate about abortion is fought on (and in) the female body; fertility treatment targets the potential mother's reproductive system; surrogate motherhood invades another woman's reproductive system; and most birth control is aimed at women.The relentless emphasis on the feminine nature of fertility has caused modern scholars and others to cast this understanding onto the study and reconstruction of the past. Female statuettes from the ancient world, naked and clothed, have been interpreted as 'fertility figurines' , while every goddess in the ancient pantheons -be she mother or virgin or both -tends to be described as a 'fertility goddess' . Various and sundry 'mother goddesses' were discovered throughout the ancient world in nineteenth-and twentieth-century scholarship. Today, many reconstructed neopagan religions are devoted to a monotheistic 'Great Goddess' who is understood to have survived the spread across Eurasia of the Indo-Europeans with their patriarchal sky god which ended the peaceful reign of the 'Great Mother' . 1 The pendulum is now swinging the other way concerning the 'female = fertility' equation, especially in the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern territories once most susceptible to its lures. In 1989, Jo Ann Hackett pointed out the innately sexist implications of the theory that females are nothing but wombs. 2 There is also growing interest in the fecund male, as shown by recent publications on the masculine role in fertility in both Egyptian iconography and Sumerian literature. 3 This chapter develops, for the early literate cultures of the eastern Mediterranean, the new emphasis on the understanding of fertility as a masculine attribute, in which it is the life-giving fluids of the penis, rather than what goes on in the womb, that creates new life.

This article challenges some of the prevailing notions pertaining to non-binary sex and fluid gender in modern academia. Beginning with a look at the history of the sex vs. gender debate, it turns to the study of genetics to determine how binary sex is, overturning many current beliefs about the biological bases of multiple sexes. It then considers four case studies of so-called fluid gender in world history—Mesopotamian women as men, Albanian virgjinéshē, and Indian devadāsīs and sādhini—which show that these apparently “male women” never lose their feminine gender in spite of provisional male prerogatives.  In all cases, it is their sexuality that ties them to their gender. The article ends with a consideration of how unreflective adoption of non-binary sex and fluid gender undermines the goals of feminism.