d the rites connected with them crept into the Jewish
Temple and were popular enough to maintain their footing there for a
long period from King Rehoboam onwards, notwithstanding the efforts of
Josiah (2) and other reformers to extirpate them. Moreover there were
girls and men (hierodouloi) regularly attached during this period to
the Jewish Temple as to the heathen Temples, for the rendering of sexual
services, which were recognized in many cases as part of the ritual.
Women were persuaded that it was an honor and a privilege to be
fertilized by a 'holy man' (a priest or other man connected with the
rites), and children resulting from such unions were often called
"Children of God"--an appellation which no doubt sometimes led to a
legend of miraculous birth! Girls who took their place as hierodouloi in
the Temple or Temple-precincts were expected to surrender themselves
to men-worshipers in the Temple, much in the same way, probably, as
Herodotus describes in the temple of the Babylonian Venus Mylitta, where
every native woman, once in her life, was supposed to sit in the Temple
and have intercourse with some stranger. (3) Indeed the Syrian and
Jewish rites dated largely from Babylonia. "The Hebrews entering
Syria," says Richard Burton (4) "found it religionized by Assyria and
Babylonia, when the Accadian Ishtar had passed West, and had become
Ashtoreth, Ashtaroth, or Ashirah, the Anaitis of Armenia, the Phoenician
Astarte, and the Greek Aphrodite, the great Moon-goddess who is queen of
Heaven and Love." The word translated "grove" as above, in our Bible,
is in fact Asherah, which connects it pretty clearly with the Babylonian
Queen of Heaven.

(1) 1 Kings xiv. 22-24.

(2) 2 Kings xxiii.

(3) See Herodotus i. 199; also a reference to this custom in the
apocryphal Baruch, vi. 42, 43.

(4) The Thousand Nights and a Night (1886 edn.), vol. x, p. 229.

In India again, in connection with the Hindu Temples and their rites,
we have exactly the same institution of girls attached to the Temple
service--the Nautch-girls--whose functions in past times were certainly
sexual, and whose dances in honor of the god are, even down to the
present day, decidedly amatory in character. Then we have the very
numerous lingams (conventional representations of the male organ) to
be seen, scores and scores of them, in the arcades and cloisters of the
Hindu Temples--to which women of all classes, especially those who
wish to become m