ed to the goddess of life and
that in her service reproduction should be their sacred duty was in the
logic of primitive people. Ishtar was polyandrous, but she turned into
Astarte, the wife of the chief Baal, or else she became androgyne and
then masculine. There is a virgin mother and a mother of the gods. The
idea of the latter continued with invincible persistency. She may be
unmarried, choosing her partners at will, or "queen, head, and first
born of all gods."[1902] In these changes we see the religious notions
and the mores adjusting themselves to each other. As long as the
underlying notions were true and sincere and the logic was honest, the
usages were harmless. When the original notions were lost, or the logic
became an artificial cover for a real ethical inconsistency, and the
customs were kept up, perhaps to give gain to priests, the usages served
licentiousness.

+593. Religion and the mores.+ Religion never has been an independent
force acting from outside creatively to mold the mores or the ideas of
men. Evidently such an idea is the extreme form of the world philosophy
in which another (spiritual) world is conceived of as impinging upon
this one from "above," to give it laws and guidance. The mores grow out
of the life as a whole. They change with the life conditions, density of
population, and life experience. Then they become strange or hostile to
traditional religion. In our own experience our mores have reached views
about ritual practices, polygamy, slavery, celibacy, etc., which are
strange or hostile to those in the Bible. Since the sixteenth century we
have reconstructed our religion to fit our modern ideas and mores. Every
religious reform in history has come about in this way. All religious
doctrines and ritual acts are held immutable by strong interests and
notions of religious duty. Therefore they fall out of consistency with
the mores, which are in constant change, being acted on by all the
observation or experience of life. Sacral harlotry is a case, the
ethical horror of which is very great and very obvious to us, of old
religious ideas and customs preserved by the religion into times of
greatly changed moral (i.e. of the mores) and social codes.

+594. Cases of sacral harlotry.+ Survivals of sacral harlotry are found
in historic Egypt. Even under the Caesars the most beautiful girl of the
noble families of Thebes was chosen to be consecrated in the temple of
Ammon. She gained honor and