is
forbidden to marry or to approach a woman, sometimes the prohibition
extends only to marriage with a certain sort of woman (a foreigner, a
widow, or a harlot). In some cases he is forbidden to engage in warfare
or to shed human blood;[1928] the ground of this prohibition was
physical, not moral.[1929]

+1064+. Similar rules in regard to food, marriage, chastity applied to
priestesses.[1930] Women were often, in ancient times, the ministrants
in the shrines of female deities--there was a certain propriety in this
arrangement; they were, however, in some cases attached to the service
of male deities.[1931] Their duties were in general of a secondary
character: they rarely, if ever, offered sacrifice;[1932] they were
often in charge of the temple-music; the function of soothsaying or of
the interpretation of oracular sayings was sometimes assigned them. On
the other hand, female ministrants in temples, who were closely
connected with temple duties, were sometimes considered as wives of the
god, and in some cases had sexual relations with priests and worshipers,
and became public prostitutes.[1933] This custom does not exist among
the lowest tribes, and it attained its largest development in some of
the great civilized cults. It seems not to have existed in Egypt.[1934]
The consecrated maidens described in the Code of Hammurabi appear to
have been chaste and respected;[1935] the relation between these and the
harlots of the early Ishtar cult is not clear. A distinction may be made
between priestesses proper and maidens (hierodules) consecrated to such
a deity as Aphrodite Pandemos; Solon's erection of a temple to this
goddess, which he supplied with women, may have been an attempt to
control the cult of the hetaerae. The thousand hierodules at Corinth[1936]
were probably not priestesses, and the same thing may be surmised to be
true of the women devoted to the Semitic prototype of Aphrodite, the
Syrian Ashtart (Astarte), and to the Babylonian Ishtar.[1937]

+1065+. The origin of temple prostitution is not clear. In many cases
(in Greece, Rome, Mexico, Peru, and elsewhere) the consecrated women
were required to be virgins and to remain chaste--this higher conception
is obviously the natural one in a civilized community in which the
purity of wives and daughters is strictly guarded. The old idea that
sexual union was defiling may have originated or strengthened the demand
for chastity. The institution of the lower class o