Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity

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 ...