Opinion / Religion
Sacred sex, prostitutes in the temple, nuns of a kind!
02 Feb 2014 at 11:32hrs | Views
THERE has been a very interesting occurrence in some churches in the country where as a result of the operation of the prophetic gift women's lives and livelihoods have been transformed. Prostitutes and other women of nocturnal professions have been convicted and they have walked into the church seeking deliverance and starting a new life.
The most recent saw the pole dancer of fame, Bev Sibanda, getting to a church and going through a deliverance session. One of the tabloids ran a headline saying "Bev's manager loses job!" This was testimony to the fact that she had taken a new livelihood that did not need the services of the old manager. She has now gotten herself a new manager! The church, the temple of today, has provided her a new life and the possibility of a new livelihood! It brings us to the subject of today, remarkably, where we would like to discuss the case of temple women in a different light from last week's.
Last week we spoke of the development of the nunnery but today we take a switch and interrogate a different type of nun - the temple prostitute!
When the women that forsake the life of the street and the night come into the church but do not transform through deliverance I have no doubt they will remain in the church but continue with the practice of the street they were used to. The new incomprehensible behaviours of some "temples" of late do inform one that we are in a way returning to the ancient practice where there were temple prostitutes!
In the past series we have walked the path of understanding the sanctity of sex in the realms of understanding its spirituality. Nuns as we saw were given to surrender their sexuality to God. Another extreme is when these same women in the ancient pagan temples were used as carnal representatives of the divinity. They served the god. They provided a link between the deity and the people. The connection to that god for the people was through a sacred sex act! Surely this was not the sacrament we spoke of two weeks ago! It was in these acts that a man considering himself unclean and vile would then pass through the temple and cleanse himself by engaging in ritual sex with the temple woman on the altar. Aphrodite was one such deity in the ancient eastern communities' pantheon.
Herodotus, the famous historian, reported a "wholly shameful" custom by which every woman "once in her life" had intercourse near the temple of Aphrodite (Ishtar) with the first stranger who threw "a silver coin" into her lap (Herodotus 1983:121-122,I:199) Similarly, it is also described by other documentation the punishment of women who declined to shave their heads in mourning for Adonis: "For a single day they (had to) stand offering their beauty for sale . . . (in a) market . . . open to foreigners only, and the payment (became) an offering to Aphrodite (Astarte)" (Lucian 1976:13-15). The Christian writers accused pagans of indulging in orgies in honour of Aphrodite, ritual pre-marital sex, and "cult prostitution" (Oden 2000:142-144).
It is true that much ritual activity in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean focused on promoting the fecundity of the land. This was linked to the productivity in a largely agricultural community. This was before the age of industrialisation. So in this case the temple was the centre of the gods, who in turn gave and sustained life. Since procreation is through sex it follows that for the land to be productive sex has to be part of the process.
But it cannot be sex anywhere with anyone save for sex in the temple with one linked spiritually and in service to the god of fecundity! In early Mesopotamia, for instance, the "Sacred Marriage," with its fertility focus, could possibly have involved a "sacred prostitute." Someone once asked me how the women would manage it…the truth is it was a spiritual act therefore they had the strength.
Notwithstanding, women have the physiology that is accommodative of all sizes. Just think of how your big head came out of your mother!!
Webster's English Dictionary defines a prostitute as, first, ". . . a woman who engages in sex for money; whore; harlot"; second, ". . . a man who engages in sexual acts for money"(1996:1553). According to one scholar, "Cultic prostitution is a practice involving the female and at times the male devotees of fertility deities, who presumably dedicated their earnings to their deity." The "Sacred Marriage" rite was one of "the motives of the practice, particularly in Mesopotamia," where the king had intercourse with "a temple prostitute" on behalf of the whole land.(Yamauchi 1973:213).
Ritual sex would not have been prostitution even if the act produced an offering for a temple (Lambert 1992:136). Rather, it would have been an act of worship.
In the Hebrew Bible, the word normally translated "sacred or cult prostitute" is qedeshah/qedeshot (feminine singular/plural) and qadesh/qedeshim (masculine singular/plural). These four titles do not occur very often in the Hebrew Bible (Henshaw 1994:218-221). The root qdsh means "set apart, consecrated" we have used the same as we address the Most Holy God Jehovah M'qadesh. For the most part, the terms occur in books from Deuteronomy through to II Kings, the so-called Deuteronomistic History, which is especially nationalistic, polemical, and denunciatory of Canaanite religion. The assumption that "sacred prostitution" had not only occurred, but had happened in the context of fertility cults, resulted from the Hebrew Bible's "deliberate" association of qedeshah, "sacred/consecrated woman," with zonah, "prostitute" (Bird 1989:76). Thus, an important category of cult functionary called qedeshah existed in Canaan (Henshaw 1994:235-236). Otherwise, why would the Bible need to discredit such women? Their function in Canaanite religion is not known, but they were "consecrated women," probably priestesses.
When the Apostle Paul in his writing to the Corinthian church admonishes them to flee all uncleanness and sexual immorality this is what he was also referring to among many other things. Further in his address alludes to the illicit entry of the same cultic practice in the church! So when Christianity became a state religion through the works of Emperor Constantine and his mother some of these pagan practices were acculturated into the faith. They were baptised into the doctrine, liturgy and canon of the church! It was then that there became women who did not want to serve the devil but rather serve God. These were the women that then became the qedeshah, "sacred/consecrated woman," in the new Christian church. We then called them nuns and cloistered them in convents.
But because the Pentecostal and Evangelical do not subscribe to the same they might have dealt with it differently. Then you have different type of qedeshah, "sacred/consecrated woman," as uMama woManyano, or uMama woMthandazo. She may not be a nun, she certainly is sacred and consecrated.
Let me close by saying the truth of the matter is in that women and their sexuality have played a very spiritual role in the church and should not be ignored. What we need to observe is that they are not abused and taken for granted. Women make the largest number in any Christian congregation or religious gathering for that matter! They are important. So women in the temple are the qedeshah, "sacred/consecrated woman," of our time!
Sacred sex . . . prostitutes in the temple . . . nuns of a kind! Shalom
The most recent saw the pole dancer of fame, Bev Sibanda, getting to a church and going through a deliverance session. One of the tabloids ran a headline saying "Bev's manager loses job!" This was testimony to the fact that she had taken a new livelihood that did not need the services of the old manager. She has now gotten herself a new manager! The church, the temple of today, has provided her a new life and the possibility of a new livelihood! It brings us to the subject of today, remarkably, where we would like to discuss the case of temple women in a different light from last week's.
Last week we spoke of the development of the nunnery but today we take a switch and interrogate a different type of nun - the temple prostitute!
When the women that forsake the life of the street and the night come into the church but do not transform through deliverance I have no doubt they will remain in the church but continue with the practice of the street they were used to. The new incomprehensible behaviours of some "temples" of late do inform one that we are in a way returning to the ancient practice where there were temple prostitutes!
In the past series we have walked the path of understanding the sanctity of sex in the realms of understanding its spirituality. Nuns as we saw were given to surrender their sexuality to God. Another extreme is when these same women in the ancient pagan temples were used as carnal representatives of the divinity. They served the god. They provided a link between the deity and the people. The connection to that god for the people was through a sacred sex act! Surely this was not the sacrament we spoke of two weeks ago! It was in these acts that a man considering himself unclean and vile would then pass through the temple and cleanse himself by engaging in ritual sex with the temple woman on the altar. Aphrodite was one such deity in the ancient eastern communities' pantheon.
Herodotus, the famous historian, reported a "wholly shameful" custom by which every woman "once in her life" had intercourse near the temple of Aphrodite (Ishtar) with the first stranger who threw "a silver coin" into her lap (Herodotus 1983:121-122,I:199) Similarly, it is also described by other documentation the punishment of women who declined to shave their heads in mourning for Adonis: "For a single day they (had to) stand offering their beauty for sale . . . (in a) market . . . open to foreigners only, and the payment (became) an offering to Aphrodite (Astarte)" (Lucian 1976:13-15). The Christian writers accused pagans of indulging in orgies in honour of Aphrodite, ritual pre-marital sex, and "cult prostitution" (Oden 2000:142-144).
It is true that much ritual activity in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean focused on promoting the fecundity of the land. This was linked to the productivity in a largely agricultural community. This was before the age of industrialisation. So in this case the temple was the centre of the gods, who in turn gave and sustained life. Since procreation is through sex it follows that for the land to be productive sex has to be part of the process.
But it cannot be sex anywhere with anyone save for sex in the temple with one linked spiritually and in service to the god of fecundity! In early Mesopotamia, for instance, the "Sacred Marriage," with its fertility focus, could possibly have involved a "sacred prostitute." Someone once asked me how the women would manage it…the truth is it was a spiritual act therefore they had the strength.
Notwithstanding, women have the physiology that is accommodative of all sizes. Just think of how your big head came out of your mother!!
Webster's English Dictionary defines a prostitute as, first, ". . . a woman who engages in sex for money; whore; harlot"; second, ". . . a man who engages in sexual acts for money"(1996:1553). According to one scholar, "Cultic prostitution is a practice involving the female and at times the male devotees of fertility deities, who presumably dedicated their earnings to their deity." The "Sacred Marriage" rite was one of "the motives of the practice, particularly in Mesopotamia," where the king had intercourse with "a temple prostitute" on behalf of the whole land.(Yamauchi 1973:213).
Ritual sex would not have been prostitution even if the act produced an offering for a temple (Lambert 1992:136). Rather, it would have been an act of worship.
In the Hebrew Bible, the word normally translated "sacred or cult prostitute" is qedeshah/qedeshot (feminine singular/plural) and qadesh/qedeshim (masculine singular/plural). These four titles do not occur very often in the Hebrew Bible (Henshaw 1994:218-221). The root qdsh means "set apart, consecrated" we have used the same as we address the Most Holy God Jehovah M'qadesh. For the most part, the terms occur in books from Deuteronomy through to II Kings, the so-called Deuteronomistic History, which is especially nationalistic, polemical, and denunciatory of Canaanite religion. The assumption that "sacred prostitution" had not only occurred, but had happened in the context of fertility cults, resulted from the Hebrew Bible's "deliberate" association of qedeshah, "sacred/consecrated woman," with zonah, "prostitute" (Bird 1989:76). Thus, an important category of cult functionary called qedeshah existed in Canaan (Henshaw 1994:235-236). Otherwise, why would the Bible need to discredit such women? Their function in Canaanite religion is not known, but they were "consecrated women," probably priestesses.
When the Apostle Paul in his writing to the Corinthian church admonishes them to flee all uncleanness and sexual immorality this is what he was also referring to among many other things. Further in his address alludes to the illicit entry of the same cultic practice in the church! So when Christianity became a state religion through the works of Emperor Constantine and his mother some of these pagan practices were acculturated into the faith. They were baptised into the doctrine, liturgy and canon of the church! It was then that there became women who did not want to serve the devil but rather serve God. These were the women that then became the qedeshah, "sacred/consecrated woman," in the new Christian church. We then called them nuns and cloistered them in convents.
But because the Pentecostal and Evangelical do not subscribe to the same they might have dealt with it differently. Then you have different type of qedeshah, "sacred/consecrated woman," as uMama woManyano, or uMama woMthandazo. She may not be a nun, she certainly is sacred and consecrated.
Let me close by saying the truth of the matter is in that women and their sexuality have played a very spiritual role in the church and should not be ignored. What we need to observe is that they are not abused and taken for granted. Women make the largest number in any Christian congregation or religious gathering for that matter! They are important. So women in the temple are the qedeshah, "sacred/consecrated woman," of our time!
Sacred sex . . . prostitutes in the temple . . . nuns of a kind! Shalom
Source - Sunday News
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