Sacred Prostitution: The Whore and the
Holy One, a paper by Elizabeth Cunningham prepared
for The New Seminary
I was sent forth from the power, and I have
come to those who reflect upon me, and I have been found
among those who seek after me, Look upon me, you who
reflect upon me, and you hearers, hear me. You who are
waiting for me, take me to yourselves And do not banish me
from your sight…
For I am the first and the last I am the
honored one and the scorned one, I am the whore and the
holy one…
I am the silence that is
incomprehensible and the idea whose remembrance is
frequent. I am the voice whose sound is manifold and the
word whose appearance is multiple. I am the utterance of my
name…
So opens "The
Thunder, Perfect Mind." This short tractate is part of the
Nag Hammadi Library, a collection of mostly Gnostic
writings from the third century CE, discovered in Egypt in
1945. Scholar George W. MacRae calls "The Thunder, Perfect
Mind" a revelation discourse. It is the proclamation of the
great female I-Am. Throughout the piece this powerful voice
utters apparent paradoxes in what seems more like a hymn or a
poem than a discourse. In his introduction, MacRae comments
that "in terms of religious tradition "The Thunder, Perfect
Mind" is difficult to classify as it presents no distinctly
Jewish, Gnostic, or Christian themes."
I believe "The
Thunder, Perfect Mind" may represent or contain fragments of a
religious tradition older than Judaism, far older than the
classical period of Greek civilization, certainly older than
Christianity and Gnosticism, a tradition that was no longer
intact at the time "The Thunder, Perfect Mind" was written
down. MacRae compares the tone of "The Thunder, Perfect Mind"
to the Isis aretalogies, but he notes that "The Thunder,
Perfect Mind" differs from the aretalogies in its insistent
use of paradox and contradiction.
I invite you to consider this possibility: If the
voice of "The Thunder, Perfect Mind" echoes the voices of
Isis, Ishtar and Inanna, goddesses who were once all powerful,
who contained all paradox in a magnificent wholeness, then at
the time that this voice lifted itself up she had to
speak in paradox. The voice of "The Thunder, Perfect Mind" is
the voice of a divine female power asserting her importance to
a people who were already deeply ambivalent about her and
their attraction to her, whose ancestors had been torn for
centuries between honoring and scorning her. Even more, this
female I-am knows that she is pleading with a people on the
verge of forgetting who she is, becoming deaf to her wisdom,
silencing her. Some 1,800 years have passed since the writing
of "The Thunder, Perfect Mind", and our own time. We are only
just beginning to hear again "this voice whose sound is
manifold."
Once upon a time, so long ago that we only have
fragments of
Sumerain and
Babylonian tablets, myths and our
own dreams to tell us this story, the assertion "I am the
whore and the holy one" would not have been a paradox at all.
In ancient Sumer and Babylon, temple priestess/prostitutes of
the goddess received the god-bearing stranger. Their sexual
union was, for both participants, communion with the divine.
In many ancient cultures, in order for the land to prosper and
for a king to have legitimacy in the eyes of the people, he
had to celebrate the hieros gamos (sacred marriage)
with a priestess who represented the goddess. In Sumer, the
people sang ecstatic, erotic hymns to encourage and celebrate
the marriage of the shepherd-king Dumuzi with the goddess
Inanna. Here’s a passage from the Sacred Marriage Rite
translated by Samuel Kramer from the Gudea Cylinders written
in Sumer around 3,000 BCE.
The King goes with lifted head to the holy lap He goes
with lifted head to the holy lap of Inanna, The King coming
with lifted head, Coming to my queen with lifted
head Embraces the Hierdoule.
According to Jungian analyst Nancy
Qualls-Corbett, author of
The Sacred Prostitute, the
term hierdoule literally means sacred servant. It
refers specifically to the priestess whose functions included
sexual rites.
Over time the enactment of the king’s symbolic
marriage with the goddess probably became mere form and
finally obsolete as Babylon and other societies became more
stratified and war-like. Then military might, instead of
mystical union with the goddess, conferred legitimacy on a
ruler. In Babylon there was also a hierarchy of prostitutes
from the high-ranking temple priestesses, the entu and
naditu, to the tavern or street whore called
harimtu. It’s worth noting that in Babylonian religious
texts, the goddess Ishtar identifies herself with the lower
ranks of the street prostitutes, saying "When I sit in the
entrance of a tavern, I, Ishtar, am a loving harimtu."
In another Babylonian text Ishtar proclaims, "A prostitute
compassionate am I."
Isis began her long, illustrious life as a
goddess in Egypt around 2,500 BCE. Worship of Isis spread all
over the Mediterranean world and beyond. There was even a
temple to Isis on the Thames River. In Rome, though she was
regarded by the ruling class as an exotic (and suspect)
Oriental import, she was worshipped well into Christian times.
Like Jesus, Isis was a universal and merciful savior who paid
no attention to social class or lineage. Like the Virgin Mary,
she was a divine and devoted mother. She was also beloved by
prostitutes. According to the wealth of lore surrounding her,
during her long search for the body of her lover/brother
Osiris, she was a prostitute in Tyre for ten years, perhaps a
temple prostitute. She eventually found Osiris’ coffin in a
pillar of a temple to Ashstarte in Byblos. Isis’s own temples
were often located near brothels and had the reputation of
being a meeting place for prostitutes.
Isis, like Inanna and Ishtar, was all in one:
whore, wife, mother, all holy. Apparently worshippers saw no
contradiction, no need to exalt one aspect of the goddess (or
divine feminine, if you prefer) and debase another. But
something happens, some dis-integration. Listen again to the
voice of "The Thunder, Perfect Mind."
I am the one whom they called Life and you have called
Death. I am the one whom they call Law and you have
called Lawlessness. I am the one you have pursued and I
am the one whom you have seized. I am the one whom you have
scattered and you have gathered me together.
There are many theories about what might have
caused the near total-eclipse of goddess worship (at least in
the Western world) and I don’t want to address them today. I
just want to observe that she (whoever, whatever she is) seems
to be re-emerging. It is time to gather together her scattered
archetypes. In her virgin mother aspect, she never completely
disappeared, at least among Roman Catholics. I can’t help
wonder if the tragic adulation/hounding of women like the late
Princess of Wales doesn’t have something to do with the
absence of a goddess to adore in the predominantly Protestant
cultures of the United States and Britain. I believe that in
order to heal our individual and collective psyches we need
the divine feminine not only as the holy mother or the virgin
or as a disembodied divine Wisdom, but as the holy whore, the
"prostitute compassionate".
It is probably not practical or possible to
reconstruct temples to the goddess for the practice of sacred
prostitution (although some of us might like to). But we can
begin to reclaim the archetype of the holy whore—or to put it
more colorfully, we can embrace the sacred prostitute within.
We can also examine our own and our culture’s attitude towards
secular prostitutes, the descendants of the harimtu
with whom Ishtar identified herself. The virgin/whore
dichotomy, with all women implicitly forced to one side or the
other of the good girl/bad girl divide, has harmed us all,
women and men. If the virgin/whore dichotomy stands, then our
souls and our bodies, our spirituality and our sexuality also
remained divided, even at war.
As noted, Inanna, Ishtar, Isis and other great
goddesses played all parts: wife, mother, lover, and in their
completeness-in-themselves, also virgin. (As an aside, it is
worth observing that the patriarchal classical Greeks divided
these archetypal roles between many goddesses so that no one
female deity had the kind of power Zeus wielded.) Though in
Isis’s case, her lover is her brother, the goddess often bears
a son-lover. The son begets himself as is technically the case
in Christian doctrine, the son and the father being different
aspects of one god. But in our culture we can’t quite grasp
the concept of divine sexual passion. So Mary conceives
mystically through an angelic messenger, and her virginity is
taken literally as intactness of the hymen. We do not allow
her to experience sexual ecstasy.
Although we profess to believe that Jesus became
incarnate to share our human nature, in all its joy and
sorrow, we do not allow him sexual expression or freedom. We
know that a lot of women followed him (although they are not,
officially, acknowledged as disciples), chief among them Mary Magdalen, the first witness of his resurrection. We are not
supposed to speculate on the nature of his relationship with
Mary Magdalen, although of course we have for centuries.
It is interesting, in terms of archetype, that so
many women in the Gospel are named Mary, at least five,
possibly six. No doubt Mary was an ubiquitous first century
name. But it almost seems as if all those scattered parts of
the goddess—virgin, wife, mother, sister, lover, whore—want to
come back under the name Mary. The name Mary in Hebrew is
Miriam (also the name of Moses’ sister) a name rich in
meanings, among them bitterness, rebellion and the salty brine
of tears, of the womb, of the sea.
The virgin/whore dichotomy demands that Mary Magdalen serve as the whore counterpart to
Mary the Virgin,
although there is no scriptural evidence that Mary Magdalen
was a prostitute. Also, according to the lore that has accrued
to her over the ages, she was a repentant prostitute,
turned from her sinful ways by Jesus who heals and forgives
her. And so, ironically, despite her reputation (deserved or
not) Mary Magdalen doesn’t get to experience sexual ecstasy
either. Regarding Mary Magdalen as a repentant, redeemed
prostitute does nothing to heal the split between spirituality
and sexuality, for in that scenario she does not integrate her
sexuality with her new found life of the spirit, she merely
renounces it.
Nickie Roberts, a former prostitute and
prostitutes’ rights advocate writes in her book
Whores in
History: "To this day the whore stigma affects all women,
whether or not we subscribe to the good girl/bad girl
dichotomy which can be traced back to the beginning of
patriarchal thought. Any woman can be branded a whore if she
steps out of line."
Until the holy whore archetype is honored, there
will be a whore stigma. Women will be divided against each
other and themselves, and we will all be at odds with our own
human nature. As a practical counterpart to archetypal
integration, I’d also suggest that we advocate for
decriminalization of prostitution. However women (and men)
enter what is called the oldest profession, whether as victims
of circumstance or by choice, whether they practice in a
manner that we view as sacred or profane (another aspect of
the same dichotomy) they do not deserve to be persecuted or
prosecuted.
I’d like to leave you today with this proposition
(pun more or less intended): Maybe Mary Magdalen, whom
according to Gnostic texts Jesus loved above all others, was a
whore, a real and unrepentant whore. Though there is no
scriptural evidence that she was, scripture also makes no
mention of her father, brother, husband or son. Without male
protection and support her options for livelihood were few.
The Gospel (Luke 8) indicates that she (and other female
followers) may have provided Jesus with financial support for
his ministry. They had to have some source of income. Why not
the oldest profession? (Thanks are due to Judith Marcus for
helping me develop this line of thought.)
Maybe Jesus, who had no tolerance for hypocrites
and who was not exactly a proponent of conventional family
values, loved Mary Magdalen just as she was. Perhaps he had
the wisdom and the greatness to recognize in her the
prostitute compassionate, the whore and the holy one.
Thank you all for listening today. If anyone
is interested, I have a bibliography available.
May the compassion of the Holy Whore be with you
and flow through you for the healing of us all. Amen and
Blessed Be.
Bibliography:
Cunningham, Elizabeth. Holy Whore, a
novel-in-progress, Volume II of The Magdalen Trilogy.
Research for the novel inspired this sermon. Volume I,
Daughter of the Shining Isles, is complete. I am
seeking a major publisher for the Trilogy. Watch for
it!
The Nag Hammadi Library. Robinson, James, M.,
General Editor. San Francisco: Harper and Row Publishers,
1978.
Pomeroy, Sarah B. Goddesses, Whores, Wives and
Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity. New York: Schocken
Books, 1975.
Qualls-Corbett, Nancy. With a foreword by Marion
Woodman. The Sacred Prostitute: Eternal Aspects of the
Feminine. Toronto: Inner City Books, 1998.
Roberts, Nickie. Whores in History: Prostitution in
Western Society. London: Harper-Collins, 1993.
Spector, Susan. The New Seminary Study Guide.
Greenwich, CT: Marcus, 1997.
Stone, Merlin. Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood: A
Treasury of Goddess and Heroine Lore from Around the World.
Boston: Beacon Press, 1984.
