, Tasmania, and
Australia phallic emblems have been found. Many other localities have
been mentioned by this writer and one seems fairly justified in
concluding that sex worship is regularly found at one time in the
development of primitive races. We shall now pass to another form of
this same worship, namely, sacred prostitution.

There is abundant evidence to show that there was a time in the
centuries before Christ when prostitution was held as a most sacred
vocation. We learn of this practice from many sources. It appears that
temples in a number of ancient cities of the East, in Babylonia,
Nineveh, Corinth and throughout India, were erected for the worship of
certain deities. This worship consisted of the prostitution of women.
The women were consecrated to the support of the temple. They were
chosen in much the same way as the modern woman enters a sacred church
order. The returns from their vocation went to the support of the deity
and the temple. The children born of such a union were in no way held in
disgrace, but on the contrary, they appeared to have formed a separate
and rather superior class. We are told that this practice did not
interfere with a woman's opportunities for subsequent marriage. In India
the practice was very general at one time. The women were called the
"Women of the Idol." Richard Payne Knight speaks of a thousand sacred
prostitutes living in each of the temples at Eryx and Corinth.

A custom which shows even more clearly that prostitution was held as a
sacred duty to women was that in Babylonia every woman, of high rank or
low, must at one time in her life prostitute herself to any stranger who
offered money. In _Ancient Sex Worship_ we read: "There was a temple in
Babylonia where every female had to perform once in her life a (to us)
strange act of religion, namely, prostitution with a stranger. The name
of it was Bit-Shagatha, or 'The Temple,' the 'Place of Union.'" Moreover
we learn that once a woman entered the temple for such a sacred act she
could not leave until it was performed.

The above accounts deal exclusively in the sacrifice made by women to
the deity of sex. Men did not escape this sacrifice and it appears that
some inflicted upon themselves an even worse one. Frazer[8] tells us of
this worship which was introduced from Assyria into Rome about two
hundred years before Christ. It was the worship of Cybele and Attis.
These deities were attended by emasculated priests and